Richard Ashcroft must be delighted that the Stone Roses have set the bar so low for big indie comebacks. His first album in six years finds him trying hard to relocate the Verve’s sense of symphonic grandiosity (to that end he has been reunited with Urban Hymns co-producer Chris Potter and strings arranger Wil Malone), but ultimately falling short. With the exception of the poignant and understated Black Lines, Ashcroft’s material is uninspired, drowned beneath bloated production and hardly enlivened by his customary broadbrush lyrics about standing alone against ill-defined adversaries, with the added bonus of a blizzard of clunking weather metaphors. Although to his credit the couplet “Couldn’t be life without the melody/ A soixante-neuf without the érotique” does leap out for not sounding as if it’s been lifted straight from “Chicken Soup for the Misunderstood and Solitary Middle-Aged Man”. It doesn’t help that every song is needlessly drawn out. Indeed, by its close the repeated refrain of “I think I’ve told you before” on They Don’t Own Me sounds like the most otiose six-word phrase in the history of language.
