Having caught 3 recent gigs, I was pleased to see people enjoying the new songs. I know it's a love or hate thing here, but I enjoyed WPINOYB. Neal Cassidy was powerful live, Staircase was well received. I'm Not A Man I particularly liked live. Kiss Me A Lot was also good live and crowd response was great to this - just a shame there was no physical release (insert muttering under my breath here!). The album as a whole, I enjoyed. Unfortunately, the concrete thinkers amongst us refuse to understand subjective concepts such as like and dislike and enjoy telling people how wrong they are to partake of this album. It has some interesting instrumentation and his voice sounds excellent on it. There seems to be particular attention paid to creating 'hooks' as they call them these days - i.e. catchy choruses that would translate well to radio if given the chance. The songs you highlight certainly support this. I think everyone is pretty different to their 25 year old self when they are 50 and his vocals actually appear to have benefited rather than suffered. I would be more worried if he had churned out TQID clones for 30 years. WPINOYB, release issues aside, is a pretty good album to my ears,
Regards,
FWD