The Stone Roses – Second Coming

Still makes me smile that the bonus tracks are still screwing up Microsoft media player which runs out at 50 tracks. The lads are still trolling me 30 years later.

Dying for a vinyl re-release with the b-sides. Make it happen

I became an 100% original fan of The Roses in '89 after I heard "I wanna be adored" on a local college radio station. It stopped me in my tracks, instantly. I'll it I wrote them off until '97ish, after happing on a vinyl copy of Second Coming. I too was surprised by the "new" sound, but had recently adopted a formula of listening to new things multiple times. I loved it. After reading their book back in '99 (?) I understood what happened. Second Coming is a loose, multilayered overproduction that created a genius sound. Ian's vocal,John and Mani funky soul groove, and Reni's jazz training coming into full bloom. As important as any important record before it!

for me, the reason second coming gets slated so much, is because it gets constantly compared to, and is measured against, the debut album "the stone roses", when compared to what is, in my book, one of the greatest albums of all time, by any band, it's always gonna fall short. I do believe that if the second coming was made by any other band but the roses, it would be seen as a truly great album rather than the disappointment it is viewed as today.

The most predictably named album ever. Five years in the making, the messianic Stone Roses returned to follow up the album that defined Madchester and relit the fires of British guitar music. The wicky-wah guitar blues sound that had crept into the last of their initial batch of releases was realised in full here, departing from the very English sound of their eponymous debut album. The huge hype surrounding the band and the expectations of their comeback record piled up in the music press and the minds of fans. Inevitably, the end product would dissapoint.

Thankfully, it isn't all bad. The opener- Breaking Into Heaven is a sprawling epic of guitar-heroics, from the murky intro (Saigon, 1968) ri through the clouds of murky riffs into the towering sunlight of the chorus and then the inevitable Roses instrumental freak-out to end on, capturing everything that made them brilliant in a whole new light. Driving South is a tangled mass of snarling riff and rapid solo- lacking structure but never insistance. Ten Story Love Song is classic Roses- glorious uplifting pop. Begging You is the best record the Chemical Brothers never made- a ferocious charge of drums with Ian Brown wailing like Liam Gallagher's doppelganger amidst the chaos. Closing track, Love Spreads is a meandering collection of riffery, encased in Led Zeppelin mockery and cryptic lyrics.

However, for much of the time it is unmemorable. Daybreak is a shrugged jam, cumulating in a nice, welling solo but containing little to make the wait worthwhile. Many of the other tracks scream "filler". The important and urgency is lacking.

Of course, there are two notable occasions where the arrogance they made their own becomes simply annoying, in a very overt way. Take the "concealed track", buried amongst 86 tracks of silence, which forces you to skip forward to reach the actual album, rather than backwards. Then there's the 4 minute intro to the album. It's atmospheric, and interesting. I'd even say it was beneficial to the listening experience. But instead of a seperate track, it's slapped onto Breaking Into Heaven to create a gigantic, unwieldly song. Going somewhere in the other direction is the hilarious inlay photos. Still, all said and done, the presentation is secondary to the music, which is awesome in places, and sadly mundane in others. Worth owning just to glimpse how close they came.