Ian Brown is now nearly 10 years into his post-Stone Roses solo career, and he still sounds like he hasn't left the late-90s. Despite a few good tracks scattered here and there, the music he's made on his own has frequently felt more obligatory than inspired, borrowing emotional audio signifiers from his proto-Britpop and placing them alongside lyrics that balance arrogance, cheap sentiment and politics too vague to count as protest. On this, his fifth solo outing (apart from a remix disc and a "best of"), he's stuck in one gear the whole time on a set of lumbering songs oversoaked in strings, whose job seems to be to say, "Listen to how majestic and meaningful these songs are."
He's titled the album The World Is Yours, by which he really means "the world is mine," as related on the opening title track. The song begins with some noodling strings and Brown enters with the lines, "As a young boy / Daddy used to tell me stories," the payoff being that his father always told him, "the world is yours," and that he came to believe it. One would think that Brown would relate a few of his father's stories in the rest of the song, but he instead just strings together about a dozen dog-tired clichés while the music does the same.
"Sweet Children" centers on Brown's wish that he had a house with 10million rooms that he could open to the "street children" before going all Vivaldi with fluttering strings in the middle. It's great that Brown wants to save the children, but the sophomoric lyrics read like the diary entry of an 8th grade girl the night after her social studies class discussed Darfur. With the strings and choir, it also comes across as self-important in much the same way as Michael Jackson's quasi-messianic 1996 BRIT Awards performance that was famously broken up by Jarvis Cocker.
Because the melodies he's come up with aren't much to write home about, most of these songs rely too heavily on hackneyed lyrics to work their way into your head. On "Illegal Attacks," Brown actually addresses Iraq and Afghanistan in an unusually specific protest, but he diminishes the impact of what he's saying by using Moveon.org oversimplifications like, "These are commercial crusades/ They used a terror charade to get paid," and pleading for "soldiers [to] come home." The song does have the msot interesting string part on the album, though, using the cellos to good rhythmic effect.
All of this comes over an incredibly uniform backing. Apart from the strings, the general formula is for the live drums to be augmented with a little programming, and for little bits of keyboard to jab into the mid-tempo arrangements now and then. That's pretty much it. It sounds good-- Brown's detached, wispy/gritty voice is pleasing as ever, and I like a pop string arrangement as much as the next guy-- but it doesn't add up to much in the end. To put it another way, this is an album I wouldn't feel compelled to turn off if it was playing, but it's also not one I'd feel compelled to put on again after it finished.
