Rating: NN
Richard Ashcroft thinks he’s a really great singer, but he’s just not. His voice is bland and has little variety. He occasionally sounds like Cat Stevens, but without the raw emotion. The first three songs on this collection of mildly morose tracks fall back on old-school, mild rock Stones ballads with some gospel and blues elements. On track four, in the same mundane tempo, he starts off like he’s Neil Diamond, which could be cool, but that’s just the intro. After that he brings in the ambient-rock Vervy stuff. And track six, Sweet Brother Malcolm (Ashcroft loves the word sweet), has a guitar intro similar to Sounds Of Silence but follows a whole different path, complete with strings. When he hits the lyric “You said it’s time to do some bleeding, time to cry the past away,” I’m like, OK, that’s enough of that.
