Seventy by Paul Kelly – Album Review

By Ellie Victor

As embedded in Australian musical culture as the mulga trees are in the outback, Paul Kelly has long been the country’s great common denominator: a songwriter whose tunes feel elemental, stitched with folklore, and whose many bands and guises form an essential strand of the nation’s musical story. Seventy, his thirtieth studio album and a landmark in his seventieth year, arrives on the heels of a sold-out arena run and plays with the poise of an artist entirely at ease with his legacy.

The beautiful opener, ‘Tell Us A Story (Part A)’, is the kind of deceptively simple strum Kelly specialises in: a descending melody mirrored by a descending chord sequence, the vocal phrasing leaning towards Dylan in cadence and tilt. He wears the “master storyteller” mantle lightly, setting the album’s narrative frame with campfire economy that belies its craft.

‘Don’t Give Up on Me’ darkens the palette – “They came at night, I had to run” – yet the threat is countered by ringing Rickenbacker-like chime that keeps the song moving with nervous purpose. The contrast is classic Kelly: shadow in the lyric, brightness in the arrangement. A few tracks later, ‘Rita Wrote a Letter’ delivers the long-trailed sequel to How to Make Gravy, pitched like a Johnny Cash mini-novel with Nick Cave’s preacher-man silhouette flickering in the background – a ghostly narrator squaring accounts, the comedy black and the heart clear.

Paul Kelly, 2025
image: Joe Brennan

“Hushed meditation”

If the theme is reckoning, the band keeps things spry. ‘I Keep On Coming Back for More’ proves age has not dulled his rock credentials; there’s grit in the gears and a low-slung insistence in the groove. ‘Take It Handy’ breezes in sun-bleached and jangling, as if air-lifted from the Go-Betweens’ Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express – all loping gait, sly melody and warmth at the edges. Then ‘The Magpies’ swings into a pleasing hoedown, a burbling Hammond anchoring a tune that nods to poem and paddock at once, a neat reminder of Kelly’s breadth of guises: all convincing, none contrived.

Across the middle stretch, ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ stands out as a hushed meditation on how trauma lodges in the flesh. Kelly has long carried Bessel van der Kolk’s title around; the finished song feels like a slow exhale, lifted by harmony and e-bow atmosphere. It’s typical of late-period Kelly to turn clinical inquiry into something tender and communal.

‘Sailing to Byzantium’ draws on Yeats with a literature student’s reverence and a bandleader’s instincts – heavy with wisdom, fate and death, but paced with a rocker’s sense of tension and release. And because Kelly understands structure, he closes the circle with ‘Tell Us A Story (Part B)’: different words, same message. If a song’s good enough once, why not play it twice?

“Songs endure”

Influences abound without tipping into pastiche. There’s Cash in the narrative spine, Cave in the pulpit shadow, the Go-Betweens in the sun-struck jangle, a whisper of Rickenbacker-driven Byrds in the treble, and Dylan’s weathered poise in the phrasing. Yet the sum remains fundamentally Kelly – clear-eyed, conversational, humane – amplified by a road-tight band and an unfussy production hand.

If Seventy rarely shocks sonically, that’s almost the point. At this stage, the surprise is how present the writing remains: warm, memorable, easy to like without sanding off the burrs. In an era of algorithmic indifference, Kelly trusts tune, tale and tone; he knows songs endure when they carry names, places and hard-won truths. The reprise makes the case plainly and sweetly: repetition here isn’t redundancy – it’s ritual, and Kelly, as ever, is its most reliable celebrant.