THE SAINTS - Long March Through The Jazz Age

Playing with nostalgia can be fatal: memories and desires blend into one, and it takes very little to stir up forgotten flavors and dormant passions. Releasing Chris Bailey's final recordings can't have been easy for the musician's family, especially after the less-than-triumphant reception of the last, if dignified, album under the Saints name ("King Of The Sun", 2012), and the silence that followed, broken only by an album drawn from the archives ("International Robot", 2017) and by Bailey's death in 2022.

It's harder, though, to understand why "Long March Through The Jazz Age" wasn't released back in 2018, when the album was recorded. These twelve tracks shine with a light of their own: eleven midtempo ballads and one hard rock surge ("Buises") that go well beyond mere nostalgia.

Drummer Pete Wilkinson and guitarists Sean Carey and Davey Lane, backed by a rich string and horn section and a sizeable cast of keyboardists, bring to full fruition the shift toward American-roots sounds that was only hinted at on "King Of The Sun". The raw nature of the songwriting and Chris Bailey's free-flowing approach in the studio are key to the final shape of a record that swings between the deep introspection of the epic "Carnivore (Long March Through The Jazz Age)" and the infectious vitality of the lean melodies and rhythms of "Judas".

The Saints' musical imagination is wide-ranging: it takes on a velvety psychedelia with sitar in tow ("Imaginary Fields Forever"), arid country-blues echoes ("Empires (Sometimes We Fall)"), and dark, melancholy guitar reverberations that adorn one of the most intense moments on "Long March Through The Jazz Age" ("Vikings").

The Saints' posthumous album tells us more about the band than we knew before. Once you strip away the semantic misconception that filed them under post-punk, the music of these Brisbane boys turns out to have far more in common with the Rolling Stones and Roy Orbison ("Gasoline"), and it makes clear once and for all why Nick Cave considered Chris Bailey a pure artist - just listen to the four ecstatic minutes of "A Vision Of Grace" - or why Bruce Springsteen didn't hesitate to add one of his songs to his own setlist: it wouldn't surprise me if, after covering "Just Like Fire Would", the Boss took a crack at the vibrant "Break Away".

"Sometimes we raise sometimes we fall" ("A volte ci alziamo, a volte cadiamo"), sings Bailey on the album's opening track, the aforementioned "Empires (Sometimes We Fall)", a line that takes on different meanings in light of what happened just a few years after these songs were recorded. And as Latin guitars, a mariachi horn section and a small orchestra accompany the album's last little gem, "Will You Still Be There", you almost get the sense that Chris Bailey wants to offer us one final farewell - that of a man and an artist who fell while still standing tall, leaving behind an extraordinary spiritual testament.

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24/01/2026