Peace

Thank God, we music critics are an insensitive lot! In ‘17 Again’, the opening cut of the first Eurythmics album in a decade, Annie Lennox looks back at the duo’s early days of fame and sings: “All the stupid papers/ And all the stupid magazines.”

No problem there, Annie. But warning bells sure are set ringing and inevitable comparisons are drawn when she and Dave Stewart name-check ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’.

But that was then. It’s not so much that the techno-energy of those early Eurythmics recordings is now missing, it’s that Annie’s heart seems to have stopped bleeding. The early despair is now diluted. Lennox, not surprisingly, still sings of living near the abyss but you have to wait till track five, ‘Anything But Strong’, before she begins to soar. Then you’re reminded of how powerful and focused a vocalist she can be. ‘Anything But Strong’ also has killer melody, coiling round lyrics that are neither cloying nor sentimental, a problem with other tracks on the album.

One also hopes the Eurythmics are being decidedly post-modern and ironic when they sing ‘I Saved The Word Today’. Otherwise it’s just tediously preachy, a tendency that also rears its head on ‘Power To The Meek,’ though the latter, at least, rocks, temporarily re-routing the otherwise mellow musical feel of the album.

And as for ‘Peace Is Just A Word’, well, whatever about the lyric, the stripped down accompaniment does serve to highlight the beauty and majestic tone of Annie’s voice.

Although this is not a bad album, it’s only towards the close that they string together a run of great tracks – from the swirling passion of ‘I’ve Tried Everything’, through the nearly-as-romantically-twisted-as-the-old-Eurythmics ‘My True Love’, to the suitably gospel like ‘Lifted.’

Maybe Peace is one of those albums that unfurls itself in time but, on first impressions at least, it’s hardly a return-to-form for the Eurythmics – and certainly nothing near as essential as Annie Lennox’s solo works Diva and Medusa.