Album: Paul Weller <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Catch-Flame!, V

A combination of brisk sing-alongs, such as the concluding "A Town Called Malice" and "Wild Wood", and heavy rock-outs, such as "Blink and You'll Miss It", the concert album Catch-Flame! will surely delight hard-core Weller-philes without converting too many new fans. The tone is confident and assured throughout, but so it should be: this is his third live album in a solo career lasting just a decade and a half. Ironically, many of the songs reflect the opposite, depicting a man constantly confronting change and battling towards a future in flux, whether it's the aspirational urge of "Foot of the Mountain", the revised self-awareness of "The Changingman" and "Blink and You'll Miss It", or the open-ended abandon of "Come on Let's Go" ("You say, 'Where to?'/ I say, 'I don't know'"). The results are mixed: the atmospheric mystery of Dr John's original "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" is sacrificed for a more angry, demonstrative approach, and both "Foot of the Mountain" and "In the Crowd" are elongated beyond their natural life; but "From the Floorboards up" is engagingly assertive, and Steve Craddock's acoustic guitar lends "That's Entertainment" a pleasing folk-rock cast.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'From the Floorboards up', 'That's Entertainment', 'The Changingman'