Golden Greats

If the title of his second solo album is anything to go by, Ian Brown has retained some vestige of humour through all the trials and tribulations he’s endured over the past ten years or so. Golden Greats is the sound of a man trying to live for the present, (in)secure in the knowledge that everything he does will be refracted through the prism of his past. It’s a brave record and while Brown doesn’t win every gamble, he does emerge with his dignity intact and his vitality affirmed.

From the moment that the exotic Eastern-flavoured intro to the opening ‘Getting High’ is interrupted by a slashing and stabbing guitar line, it’s clear that this is urgent, minimum-frills stuff. In the absence of self-indulgence, there is plenty of space left for Brown to deliver his Manc street preachings, in the process giving Golden Greats some of the heart which made the Stone Roses so irrefutably awesome.

The two real standouts turn up around the half-time mark. Fourth in line, ‘Set My Baby Free’, simultaneously laidback and funked-up, sees the singer spitting out lines which veer between contempt and compassion over a throbbing, lurching rhythm: “Came upon a man in tune with his libido/ Took another’s wife to help him get to sleep, so / Couldn’t ever level ‘cos he’s livin’ like a devil, hey.” Brown’s vocals have come in for more than their fair share of criticism, but here and on the following track, ‘So Many Soldiers’, they drip with a kind of languorous authority.

The latter is an effective and affecting hymn to the shadowy souls in love with their own destruction (“Some never get to see the morning / Claiming darkness feeds their needs”) all wrapped up in a powerful, insinuating groove. By the time it trails off the musical backdrop is spartan. And the result? Desolation rarely sounded so good.

Elsewhere, the first single, ‘Love Like A Fountain’, is uplifting and celebratory, if somewhat lacking in real firepower, while the closing ‘Babasonico’ suggests that there is an album or two from Portishead and Massive Attack lurking in the CD rack chez Brown.

What of the misfires? Well, ‘Neptune’, despite a taut and pulsing rhythm figure, is less than essential, while ‘Dolphins Were Monkeys’ represents one of those ‘the title’s better than the song’ moments.

OK, there is nothing here to match the electrifying head’n’heartrush of ‘I Am The Resurrection’ or ‘She Bangs The Drum’. And Brown’s days as chief conductor of the zeitgeist are long gone. But when Golden Greats is judged on its own merits rather than by comparison with towering past glories, it stands as a substantial, adventurous and passionate album.