Review: JOE JACKSON - "Hope and Fury"

Joe-Jackson-2025-pp-Photo-Frank-Veronsky

There is an aristocracy of pop that does not accept biological decline as an excuse for creative stupidity and Joe Jackson is its absolute sovereign, a wandering monarch who has shunned the inertia of current music for almost half a century.

For those who have always seen in him a geometric elegance and an innovation that is never an end in itself, the arrival at “Hope and Fury” his twenty-second recording chapter is not only a confirmation but an act of aesthetic resistance that begins with a gauntlet thrown to the entire world:

Hello cruel world / I'm not going away / So I might as well have my say”.

Jackson begins like this, with that cultured bravado of someone who knows he has survived his contemporaries not by luck but by obstinate intellectual superiority, while the rest of the New Wave has often fossilized itself in a nostalgic festival revivalism for nostalgics.

Recorded between Berlin in the studios of Michael Tibes and the Reservoir Studios in New York, the album is a crossroads of interior geographies where the historical rhythm section led by the “bassist for life” Graham Maby merges with the percussions of Paulo Stagnaro to inject Latin blood into a body of sound that moves in a perfect equilateral triangle between the nocturnal hedonism of “Night and Day”the pop acidity of “Laughter and Lust” and the maturity of “Fool”.

The title itself, a sarcastic slant on the patriotic anthem Land of Hope and Gloryreveals a more “British” Jackson than ever, suspended in that eternal love-hate relationship with a homeland that observes him from afar while he engages in what he defines as “bicoastal LatinJazzFunkRock”.

Not everything is linear, and that's a good thing, because Jackson has never been an artist with a simplified path despite songs like I'm Not Sorry And Fabulous People are among Jackson's most spontaneous in recent years. Taking inspiration from the metropolitan sophistication of “Night and Day” and the Afro-Cuban jazz of the subsequent “Body and Soul”, while the long narrative semi-jazz piece of End of the Pier brings to light the sometimes overly ambitious characteristics of Jackson's music.

“Hope and Fury” remains the manifesto of a man who has decided to inhabit the present without being subjugated by its trivial rules, giving us nine tracks that are gems of sonic craftsmanship where even imperfection has a class that the surrounding mediocrity cannot even dream of, confirming that if the world is still cruel, with Joe Jackson's soundtrack it is decidedly more tolerable.

TO LISTEN NOW

I'm Not Sorry – Fabulous People – See You In September

Welcome To Burning-By-Sea
I'm Not Sorry
Made God Laugh
Do Do Do
Fabulous People
After All This Time
The Face
End Of The Pier
See You In September

DISCOGRAPHY

1979 – Look Sharp!
1979 – I'm the Man
1980 – Beat Crazy
1981 – Jumpin' Jive
1982 – Night and Day
1983 – Mike's Murder (soundtrack)
1984 – Body and Soul
1987 – Will Power
1988 – Tucker
1989 – Blaze of Glory
1991 – Laughter & Lust
1994 – Night Music
1997 – Heaven & Hell
1999 – Symphony No. 1
2000 – Night and Day II
2003 – Volume 4
2008 – Rain
2012 – The Duke
2015 – Fast Forward
2019 – Fool
2023 – What a Racket!
2026 – Hope and Fury