The Soul Cages - Sting (CD 1991)

Reviewing music is different than reviewing books or movies or most other products. We're visual beings, mostly; we look at things and can describe visual things more clearly than we can describe, say, smells, or tastes. (Read wine reviews: what does "simple yet earthy" MEAN, exactly?)

Describing sounds, especially complex sounds like music, is difficult, because it's harder to fix sounds in one's mind than it is to fix visual images. As I've gotten older, I find myself buying music that is more unique or more distinctive than the music I bought as a teenager. I mostly listen to music that is "alternative"--no Ricky Martin, no N'Sync--but popular. Sarah McLachlan is a good example--"Angel" is an achingly beautiful song, and no one else sounds like her.

This is why I love Sting's "The Soul Cages"--it is achingly, hauntingly beautiful, and unlike other Sting albums, or indeed any other albums I have heard. Loosely organized as a tribute to Sting's dead father, "The Soul Cages" runs through a gamut of emotions--love, loss, pain, anger, grief, hope, triumph--and evokes all of those within its listeners, which is what great artistic works do.

I agree with others on Epinions that "All This Time" is perhaps too catchy for this album. It seems as if "All This Time", with its catchy pop tune and fast rhythm, was made for popular radio, and it was the most successful song from the album in terms of the charts. Yet the lyrics do fit with the more introspective songs on the album: "Island of Souls", "Why Should I Cry For You", "Mad About You", etc. They all seem to question the speaker's place in this world, a world where fathers die in industrial accidents, where God seems to have abandoned us (or us Him), where love is a terrible burden. But instead of being somber and melancholy (and there are moments like this in some songs), the album rises above these feelings while acknowledging that they are there. Each song drops us into a particular brand of heartache and then transports us out of it feeling renewed or better prepared to deal with future-such encounters.

Sting opens up all the stops here in terms of music and arrangements. Some pieces like "St. Agnes and the Burning Train" sound like the jazz style he went for in "Bring On the Night," while others like the title track have a harder-edged guitar sound. "Why Should I Cry For You", my personal favorite, has African-style percussion, similar to the sound of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes", or a slower version of the kind of percussion found on Paul Simon's album "Graceland." Look at the musicians Sting brought into the studio, including Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland and Manu Katche, and you'll begin to understand the richness of the sounds you hear. You'll also begin to hear how the music reflects a trapped soul attempting to express itself.

This is an album you will listen to over and over again. Maybe, like me, you'll occasionally skip "All This Time" or even "The Soul Cages", which disturbs the more introspective songs with its guitar and its more violent, mythopoetic story. (But then again, that's what Sting wanted to do, shake up the listener a bit--and the feelings in "The Soul Cages" are every bit a part of the series of emotions of loss and grief that he explores here.) But quirks and oddities are part and parcel of any great work of art, as they are in "The Soul Cages."