Golden Greats

05/31/2000 9:19 PM, LAUNCH
Bob Gulla

After the much-loved but turbulent Stone Roses broke up a few years back everyone expected the band's guitarist and principal songwriter John Squire to soldier capably on. Expectations for singer Ian Brown, though, were different. He had ridden the Roses for all they were worth, but many saw him as the Morrissey to Squire's Johnny Marr, a talented personality incapable of producing worthwhile material of his own.

Then in 1998 Brown unleashed Unfinished Monkey Business, a dazzling solo effort that suprised as much with its eclectic idiosyncrasies as it did with its sheer audacity. Brown follows that set up with the slightly more tailored Golden Greats, a luminous pile of 10 tunes and two remixes that showcases Brown's propensity for excitement as well as his penchant for slightly excessive experimentation.

The album opens with the zen-sitar, neo-Zeppelin sound of "Gettin' High," then undulates through a series of reasonably compelling dance numbers ("Love Like a Fountain," "Golden Gaze") and silly synth business ("First World"). The faux-country blues-with-synth sound of "So Many Soldiers" is riveting, and the analog synthesizer/classic rock of "Dolphins Were Monkeys" breaks some structural rules while still sounding great.

Brown's mundane singing voice has an embarrassingly narrow range and a bored, deadpan tone to it, but his overwhelming desire to look outside conventional pop ideas eclipses his vocal limitations. The album is too spotty to recommend heartily. But it does have its moments, and that's more than we ever expected in the first place.