“Some people have a landscape written in their bones”, sings Justin Sullivan on Surrounded, his incredibly long-awaited follow-up to 2003’s Navigating By The Stars. (But cut the guy some slack, he’s been busy fronting New Model Army, one of the hardest-working bands in rock until Covid made it hard for bands to work. Still, they managed an epic fortieth anniversary live stream, so it wasn’t all Tiger King and sourdough starters under lockdown). So when lockdown hit, he just carried on working, writing and later recording — with a roster of musicians including his NMA bandmates — an impressive sixteen new songs). “If I could see in your heart there would be stone and heather”.
There’s no doubt Mr Sullivan himself is one of those people. The land of his adopted homeland, the north of England, is as firmly etched into him as Wessex is into Thomas Hardy, which isn’t a bad comparison, really, as both are romantic realists with an eye for the lives of ordinary people (with the occasional explorer thrown in in Sullivan’s case) and a knack for narrative.
On first listen, this may come across as an introspective album; there’s a lot of acoustic guitar and strings, and none of the rabble-rousing he’s so good at in his day job — “Sao Paolo”, delivered almost in a whisper, is a thing so fragile it constantly threatens to fade into silence while hosting entire communities and histories under its deceptively tranquil surface — but it’s an album with a literally global reach. Because Sullivan’s themes, as always, lie along a continuum with the human condition at one end and nature (both metaphorical and literal) at the other, and a lot of very complicated, beautiful and scary combinations of the two at all points in between. When he pits one against the other, as on “Amundsen” (as the title would suggest, about the famed polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who beat Robert Falcon Scott to the south pole, but found his victory overshadowed by his rival’s heroic failure), it’s exhilarating. Or “Coming With Me”, a deep dive into the troubled mind of a suicidal — and homicidal — pilot (think Germanwings flight 9525), which is as sinister and compassionate as NMA’s exploration of the mind of a suicide bomber on 2007’s “One Of The Chosen”, and is almost reminiscent of some of the darker work of Edward Ka-Spel, give or take some psychedelia and a couple of SF novels.Of course, long-time obsessions family (both blood and created) and human relationships also play a part — “if you have no clan, then what are you?” as he sings on “28th May” (which could be about many things that happened on that date, but probably isn’t about the death of Harambe), one of a handful of songs on the album that bear the mark of early Leonard Cohen.
Above all, though, Surrounded seems to be to be an album about transcendence, or at least the quest for it. From opener “Dirge”‘s look down at the world from the mountains, to “Sea Again” (as the title would suggest, another recurring theme of his), to its close with the wish to be “surrounded by all the light that I will ever see”, it may be a work created when most of the planet was in isolation, but it encompasses both the world we spin on and the one inside all our heads.All of which is a lot of words to say “it’s a fucking masterpiece”, but I’m not sure I’d have got away with being quite that concise. It’s also available in a boxed set with its predecessor and companion Navigating By The Stars, an album equally wonderful, though I found Stars more of a grower while Surrounded has more of an immediacy to it. Two sides of a very precious coin, then.
After a few months of lockdown, it got kind of depressing hearing about all the languages people had learned, bread they’d made, novels they’d written and Warhammer figures they’d painted rather than just working from home, playing videogames and drinking gin like me. But I’m very glad indeed that Justin Sullivan has been so wonderfully productive. As Chuck Tingle would say, five stars WAY up.-Justin Farrington-
