Ian Brown

Solarized, FICTION

Ian Brown's fourth solo offering is, like its predecessors, an infuriatingly uneven piece of work. The situation is neatly encapsulated in the track "Upside Down", a typical Brownian psychedelic dubscape that finds him wheeling out clichéd cosmic tosh like: "The sands of time will blow my mind", then a few lines later observing that: "Oil is the spice to make a man forget man's worth" - one of the better metaphors applied to the present Gulf conflict. But the album's more appealing points - the My Bloody Valentine-style fuzz guitars of "Destiny or Circumstance"; the Morricone-esque piano of the title track; Brown's pronunciation of the word "mesmerising" - outweigh the awful package design and the choice of "Keep What Ya Got" as a single, which, being co-composed and mostly performed by Noel Gallagher, has an entirely different musical texture to the rest of the album. Brown's on firmer ground with his co-production team of drummer/keyboardist Dave McCracken and guitarist/horn player Tim Willis, whose trumpet lends an engaging "Alone Again Or" tone to "Time Is My Everything". Between them, they devise a groove for the album that recalls early Massive Attack; a blend of dub, house, psychedelia and blues with touches of techno and middle-eastern tonalities that add extra spice to some tracks.