Richard Ashcroft – Natural Rebel review

Secret Meeting score: 35

by Phil Scarisbrick

Richard Ashcroft is an artist with some of Britain’s best loved music of the last quarter century. The Verve were a tour de force, bubbling away in the background of Britpop before exploding into the limelight with their seminal album, Urban Hymns. His incredibly soulful, yet aggressive voice is still a force to be reckoned with as he has releases his fifth solo album, Natural Rebel.

Unfortunately, that voice is about the only positive on this record. The music feels tired, as do the cliched lyrics. “We walk those streets together/It really was my pleasure/Your beauty is so fine/Really turns my mind/And steals my breath away” he sings on That’s How Strong, a love-song-by-numbers jaunt that is really hard to listen to. The main hook on Birds Fly – “Did you know that birds, they fly/Too on the clouds” – is so moronic that it feels like one of David Brent’s Wikipedia-sourced choruses.

Surprised by the Joy is another earnest delivery of vacuous affectations complete with slide guitar and strings, while That’s When I Feel It seems to be a pale imitation of the ground he covered on Human Conditions some sixteen years ago.

The whole record feels like someone who has long since run out of things to say. Songs like This is Music, Drugs Don’t Work and the larger than life Bittersweet Symphony are so well loved because you connected with what Ashcroft was singing. He became an instant hero in your mind because what he was conveying was so effective. What we’re presented with here is so trite, that it actually leaves you a little uncomfortable after listening to it. There is absolutely nothing rebellious about it. It is just a bland collection of songs.

All that being said, I would still absolutely pay to go and see a Richard Ashcroft concert. It is just that I would be doing so to see the same songs performed that I would have 15 years ago, and that’s the tragedy.

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