Since the break-up of The Stone Roses, Ian Brown has proved himself to be something of an enigma. The former Rose-in-chief may be unable to sustain more than two notes in tune during an average live performance, but his albums tend to enjoy occasional highs. His last offering, Music Of The Spheres, while not reaching anything like the creative peaks he enjoyed with the Roses, certainly pointed in the right direction, and Solarized continues that journey.
At just 39 minutes, this is a flab-free trip into the spaced-out, dreamy, drugged-up, ethereal world of Brown, a sort of quasi-modern hippy if ever there was one. His lyrics are unlikely to trouble the literari of this world, with plenty of rhyming couplets so adolescent that even Noel Gallagher would blanche at attempting to use them. That said, the Mancunian delivers his words convincingly, over a backdrop of post-modern electronic trip-out (’Longsight M13’, ‘Upside Down’), uplifting brass (‘Time Is My Everything’), eastern melody (‘One Way Ticket To Paradise’) and good old-fashioned guitar riffs (‘Destiny Or Circumstance’).
Dismiss Brown as a drug-addled shaman at your peril: it’s not all about chemical love across a lonely dancefloor, although there’s plenty of that in the title track and ‘Destiny Or Circumstance’. Brown proves himself capable of fusing political polemic with catchy melodies throughout Solarized, something he never really managed heretofore. The uneven distribution of wealth (‘Upside Down’), the state of the planet (‘One Way Ticket To Paradise’) and what Brown perceives as an increasingly Orwellian police state (‘Kiss Ya Lips’) all come in for a battering. But his most obvious lyrical soul-brother is none other than Bob Marley, and Solarized comes complete with the expected quota of self-empowerment chunes (‘Keep What Ya Got’, ‘Time Is My Everything’, ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’).
Perhaps surprisingly, given his past offences, the singer seems to have got the quality control spot-on this time round. Where previous solo outings were patchy at best, Solarized remains consistently catchy, unwaveringly interesting and refreshingly good. The rock star that dance kids can groove to or the raver who still loves guitars? Who cares? There’s life in the old monkey yet.