When you first hear that Ripples is Ian Brown’s first new solo material in nine years, you feel optimistic. His output up until this point was metronomic, every two or three years, with very little in the way of evolution from album to album. Between now and 2009’s My Way, he’s gone away, taken stock, gotten back together with the Stone Roses, released two brand new Roses tracks, and then returned to the studio. With a narrative like that, you would be forgiven for expecting something different this time around.
What we have instead, is a mixed bag – perhaps typified by the publicity photo released to coincide with the album. This is relevant, trust me. A stark white background, a crisp white bomber jacket zipped up to the top, the man of the hour looking better than he has in recent memory, and a slogan. The “Own Brain” to the right is to be expected, the name of his clothing brand created with Kazuki Kuraishi and named after a track on My Way, while “Research and Destroy” to the left, is less expected. It is signal for things to come, though. Ian Brown is back, and he’s got something to say.
Or at least, you would think so. We start proceedings with ‘First World Problems’, a strange fit for a first single, let alone the opener to your first album in nine years. The track is a six-minute song that exhausts all of its ideas, and all of your energy as a listener, in no more than two. All of the expected elements are here, a breathy drum breakdown, shimmering guitar riffs here and there layered fleetingly over the appropriately trudging beat, but there is no bite, no impact to anything on offer here. This, unfortunately, sets the tone for the rest of the album.
Where Ripples undoubtedly rises musically, getting firmly into its stride with ‘The Dream and the Dreamer’, it falls ever further lyrically. This song alone is punctuated with the self-important masterpiece: “I, like a lion lose no sleep, over the opinions of the brainwashed sheep”. We then turn to an ill-considered soapbox piece about chemtrails, of all things, in ‘Blue Sky Day’ (“Jet planes making chemtrails, making gridlines in the sky, street graffiti not allowed, but vandalise stratospheric skies”), which too, is punctuated with a see-what-you-did-there lyrical triptych, “in plain sight”. If it was anyone else, I would say it was tongue-in-cheek. But with the self-serious spectre of 2001’s ‘F.E.A.R.’ looming over this entire production, I can’t afford to cut Brown the slack.
For every unique musical stride forward in ‘The Dream and the Dreamer’, ‘From Chaos to Harmony’ and ‘Soul Satisfaction’, we get two steps back. ‘Breathe and Breathe’ is the exact kind of acoustic ballad Brown would likely criticise the likes of Ed Sheeran et al. for producing, and sounds more Liam Gallagher than Ian Brown (take from that what you will, but I don’t mean it as a positive). The title track ‘Ripples’ is all over the place, with an appropriately undulating bass riff giving way to a strident guitar interlude sitting at odds, not just with the instrumentation up to that point, but to Brown’s vocals too. There’s almost something to it… Almost. But not quite.
Ripples is certainly competent. It tows the exact line his other solo albums have. It’s fine. Exactly what we have come to expect from his solo pursuits. Yet it still underwhelms. With such a lead-up in terms of publicity, I was optimistic. I was curious to hear Brown’s own weary world view – whether it aligned with mine or not. Ripples is an album you can very much take at face value. Brown’s philosophising and mandate on modern life is surface level, requiring no deeper thought or contemplation to understand, and struggling to justify a second listen. There are no hidden meanings to decipher here, or sprawling soundscapes to parse. In many ways Ripples is just that – the ripples of a wild idea Brown presumably had, slowly petering out from the opener, which, at one point, might have been outspoken or novel in its viewpoint, to songs that are increasingly competent musically, but decreasingly impactful lyrically – and 'First World Problems’ does not set the bar high. ‘Ripples’ is, again, a mixed bag, but if chemtrails and first world problems are indicative of where Brown’s head is at in 2019 – I’d rather he kept this creative energy in his solo material than any newer material from the Stone Roses. The record, like the rest of Ian Brown’s solo work feels unnecessary. Perhaps the least necessary solo venture in music today. And Claire from Steps just released a solo album.
