57th & 9th

Our take on singer-songwriter's 12th solo album.

Also Martha Wainwright and Pavo Pavo

From songs with a whiff of the 1980s to being an aged rock star to one about the refugee crisis, the singer makes a limp return to rock

Even now, Sting's reputation as one of rock's most earnest men looms large. His last two projects consisted of a Broadway musical about Newcastle's ship industry and a "symphonic" retrospective of his greatest hits. Before that it was saving bees and Elizabethan madrigals with a Bosnian lutenist. Now, however, the singer promises something lighter. 57th and 9th has been heralded as the return of "Sting the rock star". Could it really be the tantric one is returning to the sound he created in the early Eighties?