Richard Ashcroft: Alone with Everybody

(Virgin)

Herald rating: * * * *

Review: Russell Baillie

It could be argued that former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft doesn't quite have the hard act to follow of other singers heading out solo after the split of the band which made us care about them in the first place.

After all, Ashcroft really was - or at least his songs were - the Verve. Well, at least the Verve of what turned out to be the English band's 1997 final opus Urban Hymns. It was Ashcroft's voice inhabiting affecting songs like Bittersweet Symphony, The Drugs Don't Work and Sonnet that made that album essential, not the band's late 90s psychedelic Britrock about its admittedly exciting edges.

There's not much of the latter on Alone With Everybody, but there's quite a lot of everything else. And that musical lushness - swept by strings, trumpets, keyboards and pedal steel - can make its lesser songs a case of never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width.

This engaging care with languorous balladry, specially where Ashcroft gets guilelessly giddy about love, is at its best on the countryish highlight You In My Mind In My Sleep, a track featuring wife Kate Radley on keyboards (there's something rather Paul and Linda about these two, who are featured smooching in the cover art). And he's similarly affecting when sounding pensive about loss on closing track Everybody, which could well be The Drugs Don't Work II.

If Ashcroft's grandiose pop designs (which hint at an affection for early Neil Diamond Scott Walker, and, on Brave New World, Jimmy Webb) can tend towards a sort of cosmic easy-listening, he sometimes doesn't help matters in the lyric department. Among the worst offenders are C'mon People and the tortuously extended Robinson Crusoe metaphor behind On a Beach.

But bolstered by some fluidly-grooved mid-tempo numbers - the Big Apple-ode New York is the closet this gets to Verve-rock, while Money to Burn suggests Echo and the Bunnymen by way of the Doors - this manages a dynamic range and a sense of drama to match the occasionally operatic durations of the songs.

It has its failings and it's no blinding encore to Urban Hymns, but Alone With Everybody emerges as a quietly compelling album and a pleasant lull after the storm.