Album Review: Paul Kelly - Spring And Fall

It's been a while between drinks for Australia's most-loved singer-songwriter Paul Kelly – five years have passed since his last album, Golden Apples, was bestowed upon us – but, as usual, it's been completely worth the wait. For Spring And Fall, Kelly decamped to rural Victoria with his trusted sidekick and nephew Dan Kelly and multi-instrumentalist (and co-producer) J. Walker (of Machine Translations fame), and emerged with a gentle, stripped-back collection of songs as immediate as it is timeless.

Spring And Fall is ostensibly a song cycle of tracks about the blossoming and eventual demise of a relationship from the viewpoint of the two protagonists. It encapsulates the thrill of falling head over heels in love (New Found Year, When A Woman Loves A Man, the gorgeous For The Ages), the pledges of commitment (Gonna Be Good), the eventual plateau and gradual drift apart (Someone New, Time And Tide) plus the growing doubt leading to the eventual realisation that the relationship has died (Sometimes My Baby, Cold As Canada). It's all finishes poignantly with the fallout and the differing schedules of grief and acceptance (I'm On Your Side, None Of Your Business Now, Little Aches And Pains).

Of course, all of these songs are universal and could work equally well in isolation, but it works so perfectly as a narrative mainly because of Kelly's long-held skill at adopting a woman's point-of-view without it seeming in the slightest way smug or contrived. We see this cycle of change not through the eyes of unreliable narrators but as the differing viewpoints of two people briefly sharing their lives, and few others could tackle this audacious task so wonderfully. Unremittingly beautiful.