THE STONE ROSES
SECOND COMING
GEFFEN 20642 45032 12 tks/67 mins/FP
Their debut album single-handedly redefined British pop. They inspired a generation of baggy wannabes. They boasted the best pair of lips since Jagger. Now, after almost five years in the wilderness, The Stone Roses are back. EVERETT TRUE for one is delighted.
LOVE the title.
Love the nerve, the implicit arrogance. "We want to be the best at everything," Ian Brown once said. "To be all things to all people at all times. Aim for the stars and you're gonna hit the ceiling. Never put up with second best...." Almost five years ago, Maker critic Bob Stanley (now of St Etienne) predicted that the Roses' second album would have "One song at least 10 minutes long". The opening track here lasts for 11 minutes, 18 seconds. Eerie. He also predicted that the future was "theirs for the taking" and they'd "explode rather than tail off". It's doubtful if anyone could have foreseen the glut of bad Stone Roses wannabes, however taking the attitude, but forgetting the music who followed in their wake: The Charlatans, Verve, Ride, every skinny white boy who ever managed to form an "O" with his lips. (Oasis being the one exception.) Indeed, back at the height of Spike Island fever, none of us could have predicted what was gonna to happen next.
Nothing. Followed by.... nothing.
While the music press were falling over themselves to (belatedly) hail "The Stone Roses" as one of the albums of the Eighties, the Roses stepped sideways, decided to capitalise on their veneration, spent a couple of years in litigation trying to free themselves from both record contract and manager, then a couple of years spending the advance money new label Geffen so generously (wouldn't you?).
Let's get one thing clear right here. People say no album should take five years to make. But "Second Coming" didn't take five years to make. "Second Coming" was only started once the Roses had got all the other distractions out of the way. As to whether or not it lives up to expectations.. it depends on whether or not you bought into the myth of the Roses,
If you did, there's no possible way you're gonna be disappointed.
The album starts, appropriately enough, with a four-minute tease of dolphin sounds and seagulls crying, a distant tribal beat, the odd backwards guitar motif, tape machines left running and what sounds suspiciously like some under-the-sink plumbing. It's as if The Stone Roses are having to sift through the debris of the past five years before they can start the album proper.
Gradually, however, the detritus fades away, the percussion becomes louder, the guitar harsher.. until, four and a half minutes in, everything momentarily dies away, only to be seamlessly replaced by an impossibly dirty guitar refrain and Ian Brown's breathy, scuffed-angel vocals: "listen up sweet child o' mine/ Have I got news for you/ Nobody leaves this place alive". Jesus Christ! "Breaking Into Heaven has begun, and there ain't no possible way you can turn back now.
After eight minutes comes the hook you just knew was waiting.: "How many times will I have to tell you/ You don't have to wait to die/ You can have it all any time you want it/ Yeah the kingdom's all inside". One song in and already there are references to the Doors, Guns N' Roses, Hendrix. Why lumber yourselves with second best, indeed? And John Squire's guitar sounds unashamedly strutting, assured, arrogant (it's instantly clear just who is the group's main songwriter). Yeah, arrogant......
It seems odd that people are annoyed at the Roses' current perceived, arrogance staying away for five years, coming back and then expecting us to fall for them all over again without even talking to us (only one interview, and that with "The Big Issue", the magazine for homeless people) forgetting that it was this hauteur which was at least one-third of their original appeal. It was what lifted them above their contemporaries, made them so magical. That and some f***ing ace songs. Pop music. It's a package, remember?
Anyway, the five-year delay is worth it, for the opening lines of the gorgeous, yearning ballad "Ten Storey Love Song" alone" alone: "When your heart is black and broken/ And you need a helping hand/ When you're so much in love you don't know just how much you can stand/ When your questions go unanswered/ And the silence is killing you/ Take my hand, baby/ I'm your man/ I've got love enough for two". Ian Brown has rarely sounded so f***-me-dead beautiful, all graceful and relaxed, sympathetic and tender. This, after an intro spookily reminiscent of some long-forgotten Beatles tune or the last bad hangover you suffered (reversed guitars and orchestral sounds, the odd cup clinking). There's an awesome, understated, Les Paul guitar solo, too. How these men were ever held responsible for a return to "the new laddishness", I'll never know. Not because they were from up north, surely?!
"Ten Storey Love Song" is as classic a Roses song as "Made of Stone", and also is about the only time here the Roses sound so like their traditional anthem-writing early selves. Mostly the sound is that of a more electrified, harder (all right, then, Led Zeppelin-influenced) "Fools Gold". The Roses have got their wah-wahs out. And yes, they do have a squeeze box, mama, and they are gonna rock it all night long.
See "Driving South", for example, with its suitably Southern-style, lowdown and dirty boogie. Who cares that it sounds like Marc Bolan, only updated thirty years? I'm telling ya five listens to this album and you'll forget what little rock heritage you ever knew.
See "Daybreak", the Roses tribute to their hometown, with Mr Squire's guitar breaking out in spasmodically funkdafied spots all over, Reni's percussion as natural and flowing as you'd wish. With most bands, this'd be a bogstandard blues workout ("much like the lamentably bad b-sides to current single "Love Spreads"), composed of workaday cliches "Keep on keeping strong/ Keep on keeping on", "This is the daybreak/ And this is the love we make" even down to the Hammond break and the grunty "uhs". But in the Roses' hands, it's transformed, the perfect link between the crystalline beauty of "Ten Storey Love Song" and the tearjerker which follows, the spacey-trippy acoustic, "Your Star Will Shine". (Extra Brownie points for inspired use of a "nah nah nah".)
The third ballad comes in the shape of "Tightrope", which starts all gentle and crooning "You should have been an angel/ It would have suited you" with swoonsome vocal harmonies, plus the occasional bongo and guitar. It builds gently, threatening to explode, but never quite loses control. Weirdly, it's the closest the Roses get to sounding like Primal Scream here must be those 60s white-boy influences coming to the fore again , those 12-string guitars. "I'm on a tightrope, baby/ And it's a long, long way down," laments Ian, as coolly beautiful as a latter-day Roger McGuinn.
"Begging You" is yet more arrogantly f***ed-up funk (memo to self: find a new word for "funk"), with a genius repeated guitar noise which sounds like a cat trying to wail down the back door. But here the funk is urgent, frantic the Isleys, Sly Stone, the acid-fuelled delirium of Bootsy C. One can well imagine the young Ian Brown fasting away frantic nights on a diet of amphetamines and update Northern Soul.
"Straight To The Man", the only solo Brown composition, is also the one which most recalls the latter-day Mark One Roses ('90, not '88/'89), with its mercurial liquid-funk groove . Even now, it's obvious why the Roses induced many rock fans to cross over into the more hedonistic lifestyle of E, acid house (remember that?) and nightclubbing. Forget "Screamadelica" as great as it was, it never reached to a third as many people as "Fools Gold". The Roses were the first and last great rock/dance crossover band.
A Wailing Jew's Harp welcomes in "Good Times" "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" Ian crooning almost a cappella before the guitar storms in, all snarling and freaked out. F***, I'd love to hear Rod Stewart cover this one. Ian's voice is now a haughty sneer, a curled lip put-down. The guitar riff may well have seen good service, but why the f*** not? It's a damn good riff.
"Good Times" trails out into another sweet, mournful vocal. "My life is going through changes/ I don't know if I'm alive," (incorrect it is actually: "Our love girl is going through changes" Ed) our man laments on "Tears", all vulnerable and helpless. A harmonica cries softly, the 12-strings strum, a drumbeat which has been reverbed to f*** echoes distantly, before a full-throttle guitar sounding scarily like the one from the one good Dire Straits song, "Money for nothing" - breaks in. Then, all hell breaks loose: Guitars stop and start, percussion breaks free. F***, I'd love to see this one live.
"How Do You Sleep" is notable for its bleak humour "I've seen your severed head/ At a banquet for the dead/ All dressed up for dinner/ Looked so fine." For some reason, I'm reminded of Kurt Cobain and Lush. "Now try and picture this/ As I gave you a kiss/ The apple in your mouth slipped in mine." The title is a tip o' the floppy hat to John Lennon (originally given to his searing hate song to Paul McCartney).
"Second Coming" finishes with the single "Love Spreads", which you already know. As Dave Simpson rightly pointed out in his single review a few weeks back, Squire's guitar sounds sucked back in time and then turned in on itself a groove, rather than a song. And the bit where Ian goes, "She's all right / She's my sister" and then the guitar cuts in..... oh man! And that broken-up, mean, lowdown and dirty vocal break just as the song is about to climax, which sounds for all the world like a decent Black Crowes. F***!
This is the resurrection, indeed.
Back To Media 1994