Making an album that strikes chords with pretty much the totality of the British populace means you will be forever be defined according to its terms. But for all the raging against things that Richard Ashcroft does in interviews, that doesn’t seem to be something the ex-Verve man minds much. Certainly, he returns explicitly to the sound of Urban Hymns on his fourth solo album: neat, sad strings, unhurried percussion and his mellifluous foghorn of a voice. There are outliers such as the horrible Britpop-by-way-of-Pet-Shop-Boys punchy greyness of Hold On, and the grating synth stabs on opener Out of My Body, but generally Ashcroft manages to relive his heyday nicely. One thing he does seem to have mislaid in the intervening decades, however, is his brutal lyricism: there are no cats in bags waiting to drown, and the darkest we get is Everybody Needs Somebody to Hurt’s titular refrain.
