Daryl Hall – D
Daryl Hall’s long awaited sixth solo album comes thirteen years after his last all-new studio offering Laughing Down Crying (2022’s BeforeAfter was a 30 track, solo career compilation).
That long wait certainly seems to be celebrated in the upbeat positivity of opener 'The Whole World’s Better.'
A finger-clicking, jolly-pop 'live effect' singalong (think the lyrical sentiment of 'I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing' redressed for the 21st century), the opening track is carried by, depending on your pop-preferences, either a deeply infectious repeat-chorus you’ll be "singin' along" to all day, or a deeply irritating one you’ll be wishing faded out at least a minute earlier.
But then that aforementioned upbeat positivity is very much the modus operandi of D, as the man himself stated in pre-release press: "This album is about getting to my core; the goal was to break it down to the real thing, have fun, tropical reverie – and rekindle a musical relationship with a great friend."
That great friend, however, isn’t the other half of rock’s biggest selling duo of all time, John Oates (things have cooled between the pair somewhat since Hall’s 2023 lawsuit to block Oates from selling his share in their joint publishing venture to Primary Wave Music); it’s actually Dave Stewart, who both co-produced the album with Hall and co-wrote seven of the album’s nine songs.
Indeed while D signifies this is very much a Daryl Hall album, it could have been tagged as a Hall & Stewart collaborative work, with Stewart seen as the relief pitcher for John Oates (who released his own new solo album, the rootsy Americana of Reunion).
Baseball to music hall humour aside, that‘s not far off the musical mark because Dave Stewart (who also co-produced, and co-wrote on, Daryl Hall’s 1986 solo album Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine) is clearly simpatico with Hall and what makes him musically tick.
That all said D could also be seen and heard as a primarily up-tempo, soul-pop, 20 years later follow up to the last Daryl Hall & John Oates album of all-new material Do It For Love or even a reimagining of the duo’s hugely successful, Billboard chart dominating period of four decades past – 'Too Much Information' and 'Can’t Say No To you' for example are straight out the poppier, snappy mid-tempo, call & answer vocals Daryl Hall & John Oates 1980s songbook.
'Rather Be a Fool,' however, is all Daryl Hall; his trademark Philly soul voice shines on the lightly arranged ballad while some lovely guitar remarks play in sympathy to both the arrangement and the vocal.
(That it could have been written and recorded in the mid-70s or last week speaks to its timeless nature).
Soul-blues ballad 'Rainbow Over The Graveyard' is the melancholic, but similarly weighted Yang to the Yin of 'Rather Be a Fool,' but their mood-setting similarity is such that they would have been better served separated in the track sequencing.
'Not The Way I Thought It Was' and 'Walking in Between Raindrops' return to the dreamier-pop sound of 80s era Daryl Hall & John Oates (to the degree that you continually expect Oates to jump in on backing and harmony vocals) while the funkier and slightly left-field 'Why You Want To Do That (To My Head)' adds a much needed change of D (for direction).
Closing number 'Break It Down to the Real Thing' musically reinforces Daryl Hall’s mission statement for the album and, to be fair, does it very well; a fully Hall-ified mix of soul-pop, R&B, funk and dance-floor groove, with a side of Prince.
D will go down well with the Daryl Hall fans but given the album’s tendency to slip into tried and tested Hall (and Oates) waters of the past, D could also stand for Derivative.
Ross Muir
FabricationsHQ
That long wait certainly seems to be celebrated in the upbeat positivity of opener 'The Whole World’s Better.'
A finger-clicking, jolly-pop 'live effect' singalong (think the lyrical sentiment of 'I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing' redressed for the 21st century), the opening track is carried by, depending on your pop-preferences, either a deeply infectious repeat-chorus you’ll be "singin' along" to all day, or a deeply irritating one you’ll be wishing faded out at least a minute earlier.
But then that aforementioned upbeat positivity is very much the modus operandi of D, as the man himself stated in pre-release press: "This album is about getting to my core; the goal was to break it down to the real thing, have fun, tropical reverie – and rekindle a musical relationship with a great friend."
That great friend, however, isn’t the other half of rock’s biggest selling duo of all time, John Oates (things have cooled between the pair somewhat since Hall’s 2023 lawsuit to block Oates from selling his share in their joint publishing venture to Primary Wave Music); it’s actually Dave Stewart, who both co-produced the album with Hall and co-wrote seven of the album’s nine songs.
Indeed while D signifies this is very much a Daryl Hall album, it could have been tagged as a Hall & Stewart collaborative work, with Stewart seen as the relief pitcher for John Oates (who released his own new solo album, the rootsy Americana of Reunion).
Baseball to music hall humour aside, that‘s not far off the musical mark because Dave Stewart (who also co-produced, and co-wrote on, Daryl Hall’s 1986 solo album Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine) is clearly simpatico with Hall and what makes him musically tick.
That all said D could also be seen and heard as a primarily up-tempo, soul-pop, 20 years later follow up to the last Daryl Hall & John Oates album of all-new material Do It For Love or even a reimagining of the duo’s hugely successful, Billboard chart dominating period of four decades past – 'Too Much Information' and 'Can’t Say No To you' for example are straight out the poppier, snappy mid-tempo, call & answer vocals Daryl Hall & John Oates 1980s songbook.
'Rather Be a Fool,' however, is all Daryl Hall; his trademark Philly soul voice shines on the lightly arranged ballad while some lovely guitar remarks play in sympathy to both the arrangement and the vocal.
(That it could have been written and recorded in the mid-70s or last week speaks to its timeless nature).
Soul-blues ballad 'Rainbow Over The Graveyard' is the melancholic, but similarly weighted Yang to the Yin of 'Rather Be a Fool,' but their mood-setting similarity is such that they would have been better served separated in the track sequencing.
'Not The Way I Thought It Was' and 'Walking in Between Raindrops' return to the dreamier-pop sound of 80s era Daryl Hall & John Oates (to the degree that you continually expect Oates to jump in on backing and harmony vocals) while the funkier and slightly left-field 'Why You Want To Do That (To My Head)' adds a much needed change of D (for direction).
Closing number 'Break It Down to the Real Thing' musically reinforces Daryl Hall’s mission statement for the album and, to be fair, does it very well; a fully Hall-ified mix of soul-pop, R&B, funk and dance-floor groove, with a side of Prince.
D will go down well with the Daryl Hall fans but given the album’s tendency to slip into tried and tested Hall (and Oates) waters of the past, D could also stand for Derivative.
Ross Muir
FabricationsHQ