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Brand New Day
09/28/1999 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Neal Weiss
It's easy to forget that Sting once was the bloke who fronted the happy-go-lucky, reggae-fied punk band, the Police. His solo albums and their jazz-fusion-pop complexities long ago redefined the New Wave boy as an Adult Contemporary star. Brand New Day, his seventh studio-based solo album, suggests that another chapter in the wildly successful career of Mr. Gordon Sumner might be beginning (or, it's just a wild-haired offshoot--that remains to be seen). Sting's gone globetrotting.
It's not an entirely new exploration for Sting--he's often colored his songs with such international shades. But never before has it been this pronounced. Here, one can find him flirting with haunting Middle Eastern tones ("A Thousand Years"), Latin rhythms ("Big Lie Small World"), French rapping ("Perfect Love...Gone Wrong"), Euro-techno blips and Algerian pop ("Desert Rose," featuring Algerian singing sensation Cheb Mami singing in Arabic), and some plenty-exotic-in-this-context country twang ("Fill Her Up"), which swells into gospel triumph by song's end. United by Sting's singular voice and the smooooth stylish instrumentation we've grown to expect from him (the least foreign-sounding "After The Rain Has Fallen" best captures these traits, which should please fans suddenly scared they've lost their hero to the non-pop world), Brand New Day is, impressively, considerably more seamless an effort than it might otherwise be.
An album focusing on love and hope for the end of the century, Brand New Day is an ambitious, uplifting and mildly exotic affair. Not quite the spiritual upheaval that the title suggests, but plenty impressive coming from a guy who once sang: "de do do do, de da da da/ is all I want to say to you."
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