Uncut February 1998 Issue



Urbane Gorilla



IAN BROWN
UNFINISHED MONKEY BUSINESS Polydor ***


The Stone Rose, back from the dead.

Taking the cynic's line, Ian Brown should have buried himself under a manure heap of ego and incompetence by now. After the atrocious John Squire-free Stone Roses swansong at Reading '96, a lesser man would have cut his losses and quietly taken up landscape gardening. With Squire's Seahorses scoring platinum sales, this latest salvo in the post-divorce custody battle over the Roses' tattered myth was almost doomed from the start.

Then again, these former generational icons are now locked into a Gary Barlow/Robbie Williams stand off. Squire plainly shares Barlow's taste for solid-but-dull classicism while Brown is the baggy Robbie, spiky and volatile yet anxious to test his limited talents against a wildly diverse musical palette. He's even recruited former Roses buddies Mani and Reni among the numerous collaborators for this scrambled, ambitious, occasionally sublime but frequently maddening solo debut.

Opening track "Under The Paving Stones: The Beach" is a teasingly enticing prelude. Originally mooted as the album's title, this old Situationist slogan suggests a newly intellectual bent to Brown's lyrics, while the accompanying music promises an exotic sonic feast to come: pealing church bells, fractured breakbeats and splashes of perfumed psychedelia.

Many of the ensuing dishes, however, prove cold and half-baked. Wheezingly acoustic, Led Zep-tinged stompers "Ice Cold Cube" and "Sunshine" offer semi-mystic chants and synthetic sitars but no heart, no spark, no urgency or grandeur. Houses of the wholly unremarkable. "Lions" is more adventurous but equally clumsy, a spartan robo-funk groove punctuated by jarring musique concrete in the form of heavily processed guitar. Brown should be commended for replacing Dadrock with Dada-rock, but the ultimate effect is crude and demo-ish.

The same is true, alas, of "What Happened To Ya", with its rehearsal-room jam session feel. This could well be Brown's toxic kiss-off to Squire ("We were very famous... we were one of a kind"), but it hardly makes a case for the singer's post-split annexing of any moral or musical high ground. Especially in the light of the title track's frankly piss-poor, space-rock pastiche.

So much for the bad news. Mercifully, there are some rough diamonds in the dirt. Current single "My Star", for example, is all surging riffs, astronaut samples ans cosmic vistas. Hardly up in the heavens with prime Roses fare, but recognisably cut from the same cloth. As is the gently opiated "Fools Gold" soundalike, "Can't See Me", co-written with Mani and Reni before the split, and the brooding symphony of spite, "Corpses In Their Mouths". The latter even features some beautiful Squire-free guitar trimmings and Brown's most convincingly haughty sneer since the first Roses album. His quality control guy can still croon like a demonic choirboy.

Unfinished Monkey Business is full of fine ideas, yet they're mostly only half-realised. As the title inadvertantky implies, it feels incomplete. Yet it doens't diminish Brown's reputation - indeed, after that pathetic Roses finale, he resurfaces here with at least a modicum of dignity and talent intact.

More than anything, Unfinished Monkey Business confirms what many hoped: that it's way too soon to write off Ian Brown just yet.


Stephen Dalton




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