Almost a decade on from his last solo release, 2016’s Resonate, Glenn Hughes is going it alone once more. Behind him are diversions with The Dead Daisies, a fifth album with Black Country Communion and, recently, dalliances with guitar duo Satch Vai and pop star Robbie Williams. Ahead of him, you sense, he knows there may not be a whole lot more in terms of records. In fact, Hughes has admitted that this might be his final solo album and will almost certainly be the last in the rock vein.
The dilemma, then, must have been how to bow out. Return to the Stevie Wonderlands of 1977’s first solo album Play Me Out? Revisit AOR, as on many of his late-90s records? Get down to full-on funk as with First Underground Nuclear Kitchen in 2008? The simple answer is none of these, and hard to categorise.
The 10 tracks on Chosen are mostly heavy and hard-driving, due as much to the drumming of Ash Sheehan (of The Twang, Laurence Jones, Ginger Wildheart) as to Hughes’s bass playing. There are none of the Hammond-like organ flourishes that lit up Resonate. And if you’re looking for respite, things don’t really get mellow until penultimate track Come And Go.
The good news is that the guitars are once again delivered by Hughes’s recent favourite, Soren Andersen. The Copenhagen-based rocker piles on the heavy riffs for the opening foursome Voice In My Head, My Alibi, Chosen and Heal, and cranks it a notch further for the Iommi-like slams pervading In The Golden, The Lost Parade and album closer Into The Fade. Meanwhile, on the (admittedly rare) occasions when Chosen gets funky (parts of Hot Damn Thing and most of Black Cat Moan) he employs a fabulously light touch.
What seems most important with this record, though, is the weight of Hughes’s lyrics. Whichever musical hat he wears, its brim casts a darker shadow than before. Physically, he may look a lot better than most of his contemporaries do these days – he turned 74 on August 21 – but he might be feeling it. His subject matter is delivered obliquely, but in the tone of a man looking back on his life and the mistakes he’s made, making peace with himself for correcting them, and looking forward to a more contented afterlife – as he suggests in Chosen.
If this turns out to be the last time he indulges his two great passions – writing songs and singing – and his last album, he’s bowed out with power and grace.
