From the opening bars it's clear that the old Waterboys sound is gone. I miss and mourn the exultant, soaring sax, gospel back-up vocals, traditional celtic instruments, and meandering piano. Having said that, the good news is that Mike Scott is back, and has lost none of his genre-jumping, box-breaking creativity. It's sheer madness to open an album with a six-minute-plus, sprawling monsterpiece like "Let it Happen." Or sheer brilliance. "Grandma, we are Jonah Rolling along in the teeth of the whale." I don't know what those words from "Jonah" mean, but I can't stop singing them. The rest of this magnum opus crawls through story, myth, poetry, prayer, and protest, alternating light and dark, driving into punk distortion, collapsing back into quiet twelve string. Finally the sax sneaks back in as the album culminates in a show-stopping concert rocker, "(I Will Wear a) Crown." I don't know if Mike Scott means what St. Paul meant by that line, but he sings it with the same conviction and ecstatic abandon. If modern radio seems claustrophobic and stuffy, take heart all ye parched and thirsty: here are the Waterboys.
Other coverage for this album
The Phantom Tollbooth 2001Reviewed by Darryl A. ArmstrongThoughtful Rock music is not dead and Mike Scott has returned to make it clear. Mike Scott returns with the Waterboys mantle on the new album, Rock in the Weary Land released by Razor & Tie in the US including two bonus tracks not on the English version. This is the first official release of new material from the Waterboys since Room to Roam in 1990. Rock in the Weary Land is a new sound for the…The Phantom Tollbooth 2000Reviewed by Steve StockmanIn Stuart Bailie's liner notes for The Live Adventures of the Waterboys he quotes Mike Scott as saying, "I think 1986 was the peak. We never really came back to where we were in '86." Too true. There was a spring and summer when Steve Wickham's fiddle, Anto Thistlethwaite's sax and mandolin and Mike Scott's big music and bohemian spirit fused in a way that rock had never seen or heard before or…Similar sounding releases
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