Album: George Harrison

Brainwashed (Dark Horse)

There are few surprises on George Harrison's final album, which as you might expect features more than its fair share of ruminations upon life, death, God and the ever-spinning cosmic wheel, sharpened to a finer point by his proximity to mortality. For all his Buddhist sense of acquiescent equanimity, and the stuff about "one unbounded ocean of bliss", however, there's an undertow of moral censure lurking beneath the surface of some of these songs. "Rising Sun", in particular, seems concerned with some impending ultimate reckoning – "Universe at play inside your DNA/You're a billion years old today/Oh the rising sun and the place it's coming from/Is inside of you and now your payment's due" – from which, he claims in "Run So Far", "there's no escape". Which all seems a little more scarily Judaeo-Christian in tone than one expects – as too do the references to the Pope in "Pisces Fish" and "P2 Vatican Blues (Last Saturday Night)", which perhaps hint at some late reflection upon a hitherto abandoned belief system. Who knows? For most of the album, these musings are rendered pleasantly innocuous by the tender ministrations of Jeff Lynne and George's son Dhani Harrison, whose layerings of guitars and keyboards – and, natch, the occasional cello – sometimes dull the astringency of the message. The rockiest track is the concluding "Brainwashed", which finds George sounding more urgent and engaged as he lambasts the various veils and deceptions of modern life: education, technology, politics, media, finance, the military, etc – nothing that we weren't already keenly aware of, but from which most of us lack the resources to insulate ourselves.