Album: Ian Brown

The World is Yours (Fiction)

As with Joni Mitchell's album, there's a sort of all-purpose political-issuing in Ian Brown's The World is Yours, which likewise lacks a cutting edge of significant insight or interpretation. Admittedly, Brown has but a fraction of Mitchell's lyrical potential, so the clumsy references to "warmongers who bring on Armageddon" and the frequent lapses into tired clichés like "stay free, just like the fishes in the sea" are a little less saddening, though no more pardonable. There's also a disjunction of sorts between the left-liberal leanings of tracks such as "Save Us", "Street Children" and "Illegal Attacks", the duet with Sinead O'Connor released as a single, and the more self-centred, seize-the-day sentiments of "On Track" and "The World is Yours", however Brown attempts to re-route the latter's Scarface symbolism away from thug life to real life. Musically, the album extends the psychedelic-techno-dub groove style of Solarized, but with the Middle-Eastern tonalities replaced by the swirling string arrangements of Simon Hale, which lends the album a melodramatic politicised tone akin to Curtis Mayfield's mid-Seventies work.

Download this: 'Illegal Attacks', 'The World is Yours'