Elton RS review

DIVING IN: "The album is more focused than anything he's done in years," Rolling Stone's Alan Light proclaims in his four-star review of Elton John's new Capitol set, The Diving Board, "and it returns Elton to the kind of spare, country-flavored narrative songs with which he made his name on early-70s masterworks like Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water." Light praises Sir Elton and producer T Bone Burnett for the album's spare elegance, which "leaves space for the recurrent themes ... to resonate, reaching wistful, emotional peaks with 'Voyeur' and the first single, 'Home Again.'" He adds that "Perhaps the LP's most impressive achievement is the way it returns Elton's piano to the forefront, where it ought to be. There has never been a rock pianist like him, equally fluent in Little Richard jackhammer rhythms, careful, Nashville-derived fills and English music-hall razzmatazz." With the album, the veteran rock critic observes, "Elton has regained his sense of musical possibility and taken a brave, graceful jump." (9/10p)