The latest studio album in Simple Minds’ long career.
Like any band which stays around for the best part of 45 years, Simple Minds have been through a number of career and creative phases.
The first – which began in the punk era when singer Jim Kerr met guitarist and fellow Glaswegian Charlie Burchill – yielded art house, Bowie-influenced results that were often defined by abstraction.
The second, and arguably best, saw them produce a run of ever more accessible chapters which culminated in the dazzling synth pop of 1982’s New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84.
Phase two built the foundation for phase three, a full tilt at the kind of stadium rock kingship also prized by the likes of U2, but although it brought success, there came with it a shedding of many older fans.
The last and longest phase has been what happened after that; Kerr and Burchill have remained ever present but have been joined by a rotating cast of musicians for albums like 1989’s Street Fighting Years and 2009’s Graffiti Soul, whilst live they’ve remained both consistently active and durably popular.
And so to Direction Of The Heart, the band’s 19th studio album, one that follows 2018’s Walk Between Worlds and also the duo’s more recent decision to sell the rights to their back catalogue.
Kerr has acknowledged the period it emerges into as one of the most tumultuous in anyone’s lives but has still described it as being ultimately, ‘a feel-good Electro-rock record’.
If judged strictly in the (very false) constructs of their career phases, there’s nothing here which would fall under anyone’s definition of resembling the output of those pre-fame years, whether that’s a reasonable expectation or not.
There are, theoretically, traces – with Act Of Love being reworked from a skeleton that first appeared in 1978 and played at Simple Minds’ first performance at Glasgow’s Satellite City, however its breezy daytime radio fritz is the antithesis of that period’s claustrophobic experimentation.
Elsewhere there are some interesting sideshows, as Sparks frontman Russell Mael makes a guest appearance (supposedly) on the otherwise 80s pillaging Human Traffic.
The ‘full on, can you hear us in row ZZ’ bombast of The Walls Come Down is in fact a cover of a track already made not very famous by American new wavers The Call (with whom Kerr worked with after the release of Once Upon A Time).
If that’s an interesting choice over delivered, there’s something less welcome about the Ceilidh-friendly ooze of Solstice Kiss, and whilst jabs at the moral bankruptcy of the information age (Who Killed Truth?) and the climate crisis (Planet Zero) are to be applauded in spirit, they both fall into the vacuum between protest song and hijacked sentiment.
Most fittingly, the best moment is the most poignant as opener Vision Thing – which Kerr wrote about his father, who died in 2019 – thrives on an upfront pop vigour not dissimilar to that of modern-day New Order.
Its successor, First You Jump, gives Burchill’s fretwork a still giddy head, a reminder of the original back-and-forth which has been at the core of Simple Minds’ enduring appeal for as long as anyone thinks to remember.
Obviously, it doesn’t really matter where in Simple Minds history Direction Of The Heart lands, and huge credit to Kerr and Burchill – and everyone else now associated with them – for having the guts to write and release new music when they could as easily just fall back to the greatest hits.
Like the rest of us, at the moment you take your thrills however you can get them.
