Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What (2011)

(Hear Music)

Paul Simon deserves the benefit of the doubt. His first solo album alone earned him a lifetime of goodwill as a shining star of intelligent pop music, so it's hard not to want to follow what he's getting at with all the spiritual imagery on his most recent album, but it's equally hard to get very much out of lyrics like "Check out the radio, pop music station / That don't sound like my music to me / Talk show host, what's that boy's name? / Politics is ugly"; that's from one of the God songs, entitled "Love Is Eternal Sacred Light." Does one have to be a Baby Boomer to understand this? Or just religious?

Simon hits the right note with opener "Getting Ready for Christmas Day," a low-key but subtly fiery state-of-the-union anthem with an almost soul-crushing sense of sadness and loss. His confrontational impressions here of class, mortality, and desperate melancholy are as effective as anything he's written. He sinks the knife all the way in twice: "I got a nephew in Iraq, it's his third time back / But it's ending up the way it began / With the luck of a beginner he'll be eating turkey dinner / On some mountain top in Pakistan" and again, at the end: "If I could tell my Mom and Dad that the things we never had / Never mattered; we were always okay / Getting ready for Christmas Day." Musically, the song contains the album's riskiest strokes, before Simon slips as expected into his comfort zone of middle-of-the-road, slightly Africa-informed Dad-rock. His singing isn't what it used to be, reaching for something unattainably playful on "Rewrite" and striving hard for a direction that eludes him on the deadweight ballad "Love and Hard Times."

Simon's God lyrics come across as a bit maudlin and silly, and sometimes irksome -- none of his acclaimed witticisms on "The Afterlife" really seem especially new or inspired. But when he pulls it together, with something subtly moving like "Dazzling Blue" ("The CAT scan's eye sees what the heart's concealing / Nowadays when everything is known") or the knowing, shattering death song "Love and Blessings" ("Maple trees just a little bit duller than the memory of the year before"), he can choke you up with no warning whatsoever. As he pushes 70, he's as capable of stirring insight and emotional impact as ever. It's the weird smugness (jokes about Jay-Z, most of the omniscient-being and afterlife stuff) I could do without... but maybe I'm just not ready and the pessimism will come with time. I honestly think that "playing games with time and love" is what it's all about, and feel no great conflict about the beauty in science. Simon's been a bit too serious for me for quite some time. The scary thing is that in a year marked by two major deaths in my family, he's starting to make a lot of sense in certain moments.