ike Morrissey and Richard Ashcroft, Ian Brown will never escape the shadow of the Stone Roses. That group made some of the greatest music of all time in their all too brief career, much of it written by Brown and all of it featuring his vocals. As crosses to bear go it’s an enviable one, but also one that can stifle a solo career. To Brown’s credit he has not tried to dismiss his past. In fact, in the months preceding the release of this, his third album, he sent journalists into a frenzy by claiming he had set out to employ the formula he used to write for the Stone Roses’ self titled debut masterpiece in the hopes of topping it. This statement is misleading, anyone expecting a close cousin to the 1989 LP will be disappointed, in terms of style and quality there really is no comparison.


The Music of the Spheres starts promisingly. The string-laden “F.E.A.R.” is as good a single as Brown’s solo career has yielded (aside from “Dolphins were Monkeys”), but from there it is almost all downhill.


It is not enough to blame Brown’s notorious vocals for this album’s disappointment. He is still the same man who sang “Waterfall” and “I am the Resurrection” in a way that only he could. The problem lies much deeper. But it can easily be boiled down to one statement. Brown has seemingly lost any spark of imagination he, or the rest of the Stone Roses, once had. You can see the Angel/Heaven/Cocaine lyrics coming a mile off and the predictable bass that punctuates them soon becomes just as banal.


The songs are frighteningly unremarkable. “Gravy Train” has the only memorable chorus after “F.E.A.R.” “it aint cocaine runnin’ through your veins/blue caviar on the gravy train” it pounds, sounding more like Tricky than anything the Roses referenced. Alas, it is not until four tracks later and “Whispers” that anything of interest confronts the listener. By then the understated (or rather, uninspired) “Hear No, See No” and “Northern Lights” have made sure that the myth circulating just before the release of this album that Brown was on the verge of a masterpiece is truly buried.


The sleeve notes tell us that The Music of the Spheres is the noise that the rotating planets make while orbiting the sun. It’s either that or the sound of a man who was the focal point of a generation trying in vain to be relevant to a new one. It does not give me pleasure to say it, but the choice seems very simple.