Ok, let’s get this out of the way: Stone-Roses, Stone Roses, Stone Roses, Spike Island, Stone Roses, baggy clothes, Top of the Pops with Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, John Squire, Fools Gold, Waterfall, Spike Island, debut album: hooray!/overrated, second album; boo!/underrated, Stone Roses, John Squire, Spike Island, I Wanna Be Adored, John Squire, Stone Roses.
Can we start now? Good. Along with his Mancunian compatriot Morrissey Ian Brown must have accepted a long time ago that a certain well-loved and influential band he may have fronted in the 80s* will never be truly put to bed, no matter how many times you respond to reunion questions with the kind of bored disdain usually reserved for Louis Walsh.
The issue must be particularly exasperating for Brown, as while Morrissey has generally produced Smiths-lite solo work while gradually sliding more into self-parody (his latest solo album includes the songs ‘Whatever’s To Be Done With Such a Palaver’, ‘I Wish I’d Never Even Been Born’ and the hit single ‘It’s My Duty To Be Delightfully Despondent Doris’) Ian Brown has admirably ploughed a much more esoteric solo path. Even taking into account the consistently high quality of his solo work to date, the sheer quality of the songs on his sixth (that’s sixth!) solo album is still something of a shock. On My Way Brown pushes melody to the forefront of his music like he’s never done since… y’know… and as a result the album is by some distance his strongest collection of songs yet. Brown says he used Thriller as his blueprint for an album where every track was a potential hit single, and it seems to have worked in irradiating the tuneless skunk-fuelled dirges that occasionally marred his previous albums (only the lifeless ‘Crowning of the Poor’- regrettably placed at track two- manages to evade the screening process to become the album’s ‘The Girl is Mine’). Ian Brown has an almost naïve approach to making music where he develops ideas that most artists would reject as being ridiculous at the inception stage (mariachi cover of Zager and Evans’ ‘In the Year 2525’? Motown-esque torch song? R n’B ballads?) and then having a crack at them with such stubborn zeal that the sheer charm of the enterprise mostly fills in any flaws in the music.
His voice, however, is truly, truly atrocious. The fact that Brown has a voice that frequently resembles the torture of various land mammals, or that in more than twenty years of professional singing he has only ever managed to hit one note (the rarely used key of ‘Naaaaar’), is hardly news, but in the past he has been acutely aware of his limitations of a singer and his solo career and has written songs that rarely required his voice to rise above a growl. Here, the new focus on melody and tunes has exposed his voice like never before, and it’s not too unfair to say that at some points it sounds so bad that a person coming to this album having never heard any of Brown’s work before would surely presume it was a joke. The sheer quality of his song writing occasionally deserves a better voice to do it justice, and the fact that Ian Brown initially wrote lead single (and stand-out track) ‘Stellify’ for Rihanna hints that his future plans may lie in becoming modern R n’B’s most unlikeliest song-writer for hire.
*Is there a more ridiculously over depicted period of music than 1980’s Manchester?? Do we need a new book every week where the bass player from Crispy Ambulance gives ‘his side’ of the story? Is there anyone who doesn’t know that ‘Blue Monday’ lost money on every copy sold?
Can we start now? Good. Along with his Mancunian compatriot Morrissey Ian Brown must have accepted a long time ago that a certain well-loved and influential band he may have fronted in the 80s* will never be truly put to bed, no matter how many times you respond to reunion questions with the kind of bored disdain usually reserved for Louis Walsh.
The issue must be particularly exasperating for Brown, as while Morrissey has generally produced Smiths-lite solo work while gradually sliding more into self-parody (his latest solo album includes the songs ‘Whatever’s To Be Done With Such a Palaver’, ‘I Wish I’d Never Even Been Born’ and the hit single ‘It’s My Duty To Be Delightfully Despondent Doris’) Ian Brown has admirably ploughed a much more esoteric solo path. Even taking into account the consistently high quality of his solo work to date, the sheer quality of the songs on his sixth (that’s sixth!) solo album is still something of a shock. On My Way Brown pushes melody to the forefront of his music like he’s never done since… y’know… and as a result the album is by some distance his strongest collection of songs yet. Brown says he used Thriller as his blueprint for an album where every track was a potential hit single, and it seems to have worked in irradiating the tuneless skunk-fuelled dirges that occasionally marred his previous albums (only the lifeless ‘Crowning of the Poor’- regrettably placed at track two- manages to evade the screening process to become the album’s ‘The Girl is Mine’). Ian Brown has an almost naïve approach to making music where he develops ideas that most artists would reject as being ridiculous at the inception stage (mariachi cover of Zager and Evans’ ‘In the Year 2525’? Motown-esque torch song? R n’B ballads?) and then having a crack at them with such stubborn zeal that the sheer charm of the enterprise mostly fills in any flaws in the music.
His voice, however, is truly, truly atrocious. The fact that Brown has a voice that frequently resembles the torture of various land mammals, or that in more than twenty years of professional singing he has only ever managed to hit one note (the rarely used key of ‘Naaaaar’), is hardly news, but in the past he has been acutely aware of his limitations of a singer and his solo career and has written songs that rarely required his voice to rise above a growl. Here, the new focus on melody and tunes has exposed his voice like never before, and it’s not too unfair to say that at some points it sounds so bad that a person coming to this album having never heard any of Brown’s work before would surely presume it was a joke. The sheer quality of his song writing occasionally deserves a better voice to do it justice, and the fact that Ian Brown initially wrote lead single (and stand-out track) ‘Stellify’ for Rihanna hints that his future plans may lie in becoming modern R n’B’s most unlikeliest song-writer for hire.
*Is there a more ridiculously over depicted period of music than 1980’s Manchester?? Do we need a new book every week where the bass player from Crispy Ambulance gives ‘his side’ of the story? Is there anyone who doesn’t know that ‘Blue Monday’ lost money on every copy sold?
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