IAN BROWN
Music of the Spheres
Polydor 589126-2
IN HIS third solo outing, the former Stone Roses frontman returns here to the baggy grooves that informed his early work, this time lent lustre by the Floyd-recalling pyrotechnics of the guitarist Francis Dunnery. But fancy fretwork cannot disguise the fact that, quite apart from the lyrics (which, as usual with Brown, are almost heroically nonsensical), the songs themselves add up to little more than a beginner's guide to British blues-rock.
Shorn of its sonic finery, a track such as The Gravy Train would be a fag-break jam session rather than a song masquerading as a bona fide, through-written composition. And despite pockets of resistance in the shape of Shadow of a Saint and Bubbles, the overall impression is still of a once-relevant artist succumbing to the iron law of waning rock careers: the higher the production values, the worse the product.
Dan Cairns
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