IAN BROWN - Golden Greats
(Polydor)
***
THE STONE ROSES - The Stone Roses Tenth Anniversary Edition
(Silvertone)
*****
Review: Russell Baillie
Ian Brown was the singer in the Stone Roses, the English band which, after delivering a remarkable debut album (now in a nifty anniversary edition) in 1989, took five years to make their lacklustre follow-up, The Second Coming, then fell apart.
Golden Greats is Brown's second solo album after his reportedly unedifying debut, Unfinished Monkey Business, and after a wee stint in jail for rock star behaviour.
And given the view that Roses' guitarist John Squire was the musical brain of the band (though his own band, the Seahorses, have amounted to little) it is surprising to report that Golden Greats is officially: Not Bad at All.
Certainly, Brown is no longer interested or capable of delivering the towering tunes of his previous employers. However, his mealy mouthed delivery suits the mix of stoned guitar grooves, slouching funk and triphop strangeness he offers across 10 tracks.
Opener Getting High is as Roses-rock as this gets, a song which could have been a Second Coming out-take. But Love Like a Fountain and The Dolphins Were Monkeys have an attractively oddball funky swagger, while Free My Way is Brown's own Jailhouse Rock complete with churning cellos and stuttering beats.
Set My Baby Free and So Many Soldiers suggest a beatbox-era Syd Barrett in their pastoral trippiness, though the album does tend to unravel towards the end into spaced-out silliness (Neptune) or studio jamming (First World).
But there's enough intriguing and near-tuneful work here to reconsider Brown's talents and get him that cult following he probably deserves.
Though of course that Stone Roses' debut - re-released as a neatly packaged and annotated double CD with the original album on one disc and the extras on the other - will forever remain untoppable by its makers.
And initially, as the slow creep of the first track , I Wanna Be Adored, surges forth it sure can take you back to those early days of the last decade if that's when you heard it first time round. But it still stands up this far from its original context as a one-off rock album.
Bookended by two daring proclamations-as-anthems (Adored and I Am The Resurrection), in between the songs mixed singalong wistfulness and menace with Squire's busy bluesy post-Smiths' guitar work and a fluid rhythm section. And it came with complete with many tangents - the anti-monarchy ditty, Elizabeth M: Dear (set to the tune of Scarborough Fair), and Don't Stop, largely a backwards-tape version of the song immediately before it, Waterfall.
It still makes perfect sense. And if anyone is about to spring (and here's the official first use of phrase) the 90s revival, the Stone Roses is a great place to start.
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