Richard Ashcroft - These People

The Guardian 60

(Cooking Vinyl)

Making an album that strikes chords with pretty much the totality of the British populace means you will be forever be defined according to its terms. But for all the raging against things that Richard Ashcroft does in interviews, that doesn’t seem to be something the ex-Verve man minds much. Certainly, he returns explicitly to the sound of Urban Hymns on his fourth solo album: neat, sad strings, unhurried percussion and his mellifluous foghorn of a voice. There are outliers such as the horrible Britpop-by-way-of-Pet-Shop-Boys punchy greyness of Hold On, and the grating synth stabs on opener Out of My Body, but generally Ashcroft manages to relive his heyday nicely. One thing he does seem to have mislaid in the intervening decades, however, is his brutal lyricism: there are no cats in bags waiting to drown, and the darkest we get is Everybody Needs Somebody to Hurt’s titular refrain.

Pitchfork 51

It’s been a busy month for ’90s Brit-rock icons on the comeback trail—Radiohead, Super Furry Animals, and even the Stone Roses have all recently resurfaced after prolonged periods of inactivity. But of them all, Richard Ashcroft arguably has the longest climb back up the mountain, even when you take the Roses’ DOA “All for One” single into account—after soaring to the top of the pops in 1997 with The Verve’s platinum-plated opus Urban Hymns, his stock has tumbled down unceremoniously through a series of increasingly soppy solo albums released over the course of the '00s.

Like many rock ‘n’ rollers saddled with wild-child reputations, Ashcroft has been accused of going soft in his middle age. The truth is, Ashcroft was flashing his sensitive side way back when the Verve was doing pretty acoustic versions of “Make It Till Monday” on the promo circuit for their 1993 debut, A Storm in Heaven. However, his solo work has too often highlighted the big difference tenderness and mush, blowing out the resolution of simplistic songs like someone trying to project an iPhone home movie onto an IMAX screen.

In a way, the appearance of the first Richard Ashcroft album in six years is more unlikely than the Roses’ return after 21. After all, in this current gig economy, it’s expected that our favorite groups will reunite for the plum festival guarantees, no matter how acrimonious the initial split. And, having already played the Verve comeback card in 2008, followed by an aborted attempt at rebranding, it seemed like Mad Richard was content to just carry on as Dad Richard. But if the emergence of These People is something of a surprise, its contents are anything but. (Well, other than the fact it took a preaching populist like Ashcroft this long to title a song “Hold On”). The extended layoff has only further entrenched Richard Ashcroft’s desire to make Richard Ashcroft albums, with all the ostentatious orchestration, resurrection rhetoric, bumper-sticker mantras, clunky metaphors, and cursory electro-dabbling those entail.

In hindsight, the early Verve were essentially the missing link between Spiritualized and Oasis, but with Urban Hymns, they anticipated the post-Britpop soft-rock that Coldplay would use to fill stadiums. And though Ashcroft is loathe to own that legacy, he and Chris Martin ultimately share similar goals—namely, to retrofit classic, Glastonbury-sized balladry to contemporary Top 40 standards, and sell it to the masses with life-affirming, one-size-fits all-lyrics. Ashcroft still possesses one of rock’s great voices, his singular balance of grit and gravitas undisturbed by the passage of time. But unlike Martin, there’s an inherent weariness to Ashcroft’s singing that meshes awkwardly with his forays into upbeat dance-pop.

The most thrilling moments in Ashcroft’s discography have come when it sounds like he’s getting lost inside his own music, with the surging sonics and multi-tracked vocals pushing him toward rapture. But here, he’s merely singing about going “Out of My Body” over pro-forma disco-house presets rather than actually doing it. That fish-out-of-water feeling only amplifies his lazier lyrics, whether he’s dropping musty Watergate metaphors on that track, or deploying tired heroine-as-heroin cliches about a woman who goes “straight for my veins” on the arms-aloft anthem “This Is How It Feels.”

These People supposedly addresses socio-political hot topics like Syria’s refugee crisis and government surveillance, but those inspirations yield precious little insight—as per his solo m.o., Ashcroft transforms real-life tumult into nondescript, placeholder lyrics. And while “Everybody Needs Somebody to Hurt” and “Hold On” respectively recycle the “life’s a bitch” sentiments of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” atop neon-flickered electro-pop and sunrise-rave sonics, their pat advice (e.g., “So hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on/You know there ain’t a lot time, but I know that we can make it!”) doesn’t exactly instill you with the fuck-it-all swagger that prompts one to plow into grannies on your morning stroll.

Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs. His reunion with the Verve’s go-to string arranger Wil Malone pays immediate dividends on “They Don’t Own Me,” which plays like a sequel to “Lucky Man,” albeit with the sense of fire-wielding wonderment replaced by hardened resilience. Even better is the atmospheric, dead-of-night rumination “Picture of You,” which mines a haunted melancholy that Ashcroft hasn’t really tapped since “Sonnet” and “The Drugs Don’t Work,” while “Black Lines” yields his most rousing performance in ages. Sure, it doesn’t tell you anything we haven’t heard before: “It’s real life/Sometimes it gets so hard.” But more than just remind us once again about the inevitability of debt and death, the song’s ascendant, string-swept chorus shows Ashcroft still has the ability to make us momentarily forget about it.

The Guardian 40

(Righteous Phonographic Association/Cooking Vinyl)

Richard Ashcroft must be delighted that the Stone Roses have set the bar so low for big indie comebacks. His first album in six years finds him trying hard to relocate the Verve’s sense of symphonic grandiosity (to that end he has been reunited with Urban Hymns co-producer Chris Potter and strings arranger Wil Malone), but ultimately falling short. With the exception of the poignant and understated Black Lines, Ashcroft’s material is uninspired, drowned beneath bloated production and hardly enlivened by his customary broadbrush lyrics about standing alone against ill-defined adversaries, with the added bonus of a blizzard of clunking weather metaphors. Although to his credit the couplet “Couldn’t be life without the melody/ A soixante-neuf without the érotique” does leap out for not sounding as if it’s been lifted straight from “Chicken Soup for the Misunderstood and Solitary Middle-Aged Man”. It doesn’t help that every song is needlessly drawn out. Indeed, by its close the repeated refrain of “I think I’ve told you before” on They Don’t Own Me sounds like the most otiose six-word phrase in the history of language.

Drowned In Sound 30

It’s for precisely that reason that a few cynical eyebrows were raised at the news that, with this comeback LP, Ashcroft had been spurred to emerge from semi-retirement by a burning desire to channel some of his bewilderment and anger at the state of the world we’re living in into a new batch of songs. Topicality does not seem like something that would sit comfortably with his standard approach to songwriting; his finest moments have always thematically been born out of romance, the everyday, or some combination of the two. Add to that the fact that he is not a man known for delivering his messages in anything approaching a nuanced fashion, and it’s initially difficult to envision the very ideas behind These People actually suiting him.

Not that that was ever likely to stop him; he’s only given a handful of interviews in support of this release, but they’ve all suggested that his appetite for bravado and his stratospheric level of self-regard remain intact. Even in his chat with John Doran for Noisey, in which the Quietus man did a sterling job of opening the usually po-faced singer up with questions about the scarcity of gravy-serving London chippies, Ashcroft still managed to shoehorn in the ludicrous assertion that Urban Hymns was effectively a solo project. Given that The Verve’s 2008 reunion album Forth, which chronologically came between Ashcroft’s turgid Keys to the World and the catastrophic United Nations of Sound, was actually a perfectly passable addition to the band’s laudable back catalogue suggests that Ashcroft can ill-afford to be so casually dismissive of his former bandmates, Nick McCabe in particular.

Funnily enough, These People actually does see him working with Wil Malone, who lends orchestration, just as he did on A Northern Soul, Urban Hymns and Ashcroft’s solo debut, Alone with Everybody. Perhaps this is why Ashcroft felt moved, in an interview with NME, to claim that opener ‘Out of My Body’ is cut from the same cloth as ‘A Song for the Lovers’ and ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. In fact, the strings on it are largely suffocated by comically outdated synths and a weak, barely-there beat. It kind of sets the tone for a lot of what’s to come, though; there’s a whole slew of tracks on which the guitar is eschewed and replaced by really uninspiring electronic backdrops that are then arbitrarily augmented by Malone’s arrangements; ‘Hold On’ is a case in point (no, I can’t believe he’s never previously named a song that, either), as is the meandering ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Hurt’.

The closest he gets here to producing anything that might come close to standing alongside his best work is when he just unabashedly goes down the predictable route; ‘Black Lines’ is a bare-faced shot at recapturing The Verve at their most commercially viable, with guitars that are oh-so-Nineties ringing out and another benign, but ultimately uninspiring bit of orchestral backing from Malone. ‘Picture of You’, too, strikes for similar territory. It’s when you realise that ‘This Is How It Feels’ - the album’s deeply average lead single - is actually about as good as These People gets that you start to wonder how Ashcroft managed to fall this far. Only the most blinkered fan would make any case for Alone with Everybody, Human Conditions or Keys to the World being classics, but at least they all showed flashes of two things - urgency and ambition. These People has neither. Human Conditions was slagged to high heaven when it came out, but that sprawling opening track, ‘Check the Meaning’, at least conveyed Ashcroft’s appetite for drama on a level beyond a heavily-sedated string section. ‘Break the Night with Colour’, off of Keys to the World, brought that ear for melody into sharp focus, even if the rest of the record didn’t. It’s hard to imagine even the most dyed-in-the-wool supporter showing up to a gig and saying, “fuck, I really hope he does ‘They Don’t Own Me’ tonight.” There’s nothing on These People to inspire anything like that level of interest, let alone dedication.

There should, of course, be a ‘but’ here. After all, everything Ashcroft’s said in the lead-up to this release has suggested that this is an incisive collection of effectively political songs, that try to make sense of the awful mess we’re presently in. You have to remember that there’s probably plenty of people who’ll buy this record who haven’t read either the label spiel or any of the press behind it, but even they should have an inkling of what to expect; the front cover offers myriad clues. Ashcroft appears on it near-shaven headed, which might just have been a measure to make sure nobody recognised him on the street post-United Nations of Sound, but we’ll assume instead it was part of the image he appears to be trying to cultivate here, which is borderline militant; he has a gas mask hanging around his neck, and holds his acoustic guitar like he’s just cocked it. Here he is, Sergeant Ashcroft, ready to wade into battle to protect us, “the people, yeah, woooahhh, soul power, alright”.

There is a bluntness to Ashcroft’s best songwriting that you can pick out of all of his finest efforts; ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’s unflinching lyrics are a major reason why, as the man himself astutely observed, it really is the best song that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have written since ‘Brown Sugar’. Similarly, ‘Lucky Man’ is just so beautiful and earnest and unguarded, and so’s ‘Sonnet’, for that matter, and then there’s ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, which forces you to sit up and listen by way of a punch in the gut. It’s not unreasonable to think that maybe, if that directness was translated to the burning issues of the day, Ashcroft could possibly be a halfway decent political songwriter. That’s certainly what all of the noise around These People seems to have suggested he was driving at, this time around. And it’s also why I was so agog to hear ten tracks that simply spun the same platitudes of old.

There’s no commentary here, social or otherwise. It’s just Ashcroft on the same lyrical autopilot he settled into on Alone with Everybody and only ever seemed to break out of - albeit sporadically - on Forth. 'Over the period I wrote this record, we’ve lived through incredible times,' he told NME in February. 'Highly contentious wars were going into the pot; grassroots movements turning into semi-revolutions; Tahrir Square. It was kicking off all over the globe, people being divided. Pepper spray everywhere, tear gas.' God knows, you’d never guess based on the characteristic vagueness of the words he’s written for this album, and for him to bring these issues up in an interview seems really disingenuous. He talks plenty on These People. He says practically nothing.

The whole story behind this album just doesn’t stack up once you’ve heard it. Ashcroft is one of the great British musical icons of the Nineties, and quite rightly too - A Storm in Heaven and Urban Hymns, particularly, will always have a cherished place in my record collection. But the narrative we’re being peddled here - that he’s back, finally, to set this uncertain world of ours to rights - is not reflected either in the badly dated sound of the record or the non-committal words that accompany it. Perhaps the worst crime is that Ashcroft never even gives that wonderfully expressive voice of his a proper workout; he hasn’t written anything here that demands he really go for it. Instead, These People is an album that’s so safe, it’s almost dangerous; even his most fervent fans, the ones who loved Human Conditions and Keys to the World, are surely going to pick this one up and think, 'fucking hell, this is a bit middle of the road'.