Grace Jones - Hurricane (2008) Album Grace Jones Length 48:57 Format CD Label Wall of Sound Index 123 Collection Status In Collection Packaging Jewel Case Track List 1 This Is 5:40 2 William's Blood 5:59 3 Corporate Cannibal 5:55 4 I'm Crying (Mother's Tears) 4:34 5 Well Well Well 3:53 6 Hurricane 6:34 7 Love You To Life 5:21 8 Sunset Sunrise 5:13 9 Devil In My Life 5:48 Personal Price £ 12.99 Rating 50 Links Amazon UK Amazon US Details Live No Rare No UPC 5413356575026 Notes A unspoken etiquette exists for the rock star who re-emerges after a long period out of the limelight. Their rehabilitation is dependent on them appearing chastened, humbled and educated by their wilderness years. They should be modest about their successes and sanguine about their failures. They are expected to have conquered their demons and to see a lot of their former selves in Amy Winehouse. They are required to retell stories from their dissolute glory days for the benefit of the journalist's Dictaphone and to offer assurances that such behaviour is firmly in their past, for the benefit of the record label executives who've given them another chance. Among those recently given another chance is Grace Jones, promoting her first new album in 19 years. Her career didn't exactly grind to a halt following 1989's disappointing Bulletproof Heart - she continued performing live, but certainly in reduced circumstances. Her highest-profile British appearance was 2006's Jones Jones Jones concert in Cardiff. It broke the world record for the number of people with the same surname gathered in one place, but it's hard not to feel that appearing alongside Dai Jones - evergreen star of SC4's farming programme Cefn Gwlad - is a disappointing way for the former queen of Studio 54 to earn a living. Nevertheless, Jones seems disinclined to play by the usual comeback rules. There's not a hint of penitence nor hard-won wisdom in her interviews: if anything, she seems even more demented than in her Russell Harty-thumping heyday. Journalists seldom get any sense out of her, but they always get a story. In one recent encounter Jones got wildly pissed on sambucca, tried to cop off with the female journalist, then ran off down the road flapping her arms "like a bat" and howling. The problem for her new collaborators isn't just the usual comeback conundrum of making something that lives up to the back catalogue, although that's a particularly tough call in Jones' case, because her back catalogue has stubbornly refused to date: you might expect music the Face magazine considered the dernier cri in 1981 to have weathered rather badly - those Blue Rondo A La Turk albums certainly don't sound so great these days - but like the woman who made them, Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing seem spookily immune to the ravages of time. It's the challenge of making an album that lives up to Jones herself at 60. The team behind Hurricane is weird enough: it stretches from Sly and Robbie to Phillip Sheppard, currently visiting professor at the Oxford Cello School and is helmed by Jones' current paramour, the fourth Viscount Wimborne. During Hurricane's best moments - all during the album's first half - they come up with music befitting the uniqueness of their employer. The gripping opener This Is supports Jones' voice, switching between a Jamaican-accented growl and her patent stentorian Nico-goes-disco style with a dancehall-inspired beat and squalls of Robert Fripp-ish guitar. Corporate Cannibal devises a suitably weird hybrid of nu-metal and dub, with the distorted guitar pushed to the background and swamped beneath echoing electronic effects. Equally, there's the pleasing sense that Jones herself wants to push herself into new areas. Considering she spent the 80s trying to convince the world she was from another planet, you learn a surprising amount about her upbringing from Williams Blood and I'm Crying (Mother's Tears): the latter, for some reason, punctuating the moving saga of Jones' relationship with her mother with the sound of someone squeezing a squeaky toy. But after a tough, thrilling first half, Hurricane suddenly seems to run out of puff, as if exhausted by the effort of trying to keep up with its star. The sound of Tricky muttering away - and, at one stage, making a noise that sounds suspiciously like someone hawking up a greenie - can't stop the title track from meandering. The more surprising musical hybrids are replaced by imitations of the reggae sound minted on the albums Jones recorded at Nassau's Compass Point studios. It's perfectly done, but marked by a creeping pointlessness: why would you put on Well Well Well or Love You to Life when you could listen to her peerless 1980 cover of Chrissie Hynde's Private Life? But if Hurricane isn't a triumph, it's a distinct improvement on sharing a stage with Dai Jones. It starts strongly, but peters out, delivering a kind of Sealed Knot of Jones' classic style. Of course, delivering a kind of Sealed Knot re-enactment of an artist's classic style is exactly what most comeback albums do these days. But, as we've already established, Grace Jones seems far too strange to adhere to the usual rules.