As far back as A Northern Soul, romantics might’ve cast Richard Ashcroft as a Blakean wildman visioning angels on steepletops and railing at the uncomprehending stars. Sceptics could’ve painted him a two-hit wonder with a distorted idea of his place in the grand scheme. Realists made a case for him as a gifted singles artist (‘Bittersweet Symphony’ and ‘A Song For The Lovers’ being up there with Scott Walker or Arthur Lee) who never got the hang of crafting a great album. Even the most wide-eyed of '90s fantasists had to admit that Urban Hymns was padded with filler.
But he was still just a pup then. This listener bypassed his first two solo albums, Alone With Everybody and Human Conditions, but on the evidence of Keys To The World (and given that ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ hinged around Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral reimagining of ‘The Last Time’) there’s a fair case to be made for Ashcroft functioning best not as an indie roots-rock seer but a promiscuous pop magpie.
Indeed, the first single from this album ‘Break The Night With Colour’ seems grown from a DNA swab of Aerosmith’s harspichord intro to ‘Dream On’, while ‘Cry Till The Morning’ is a bleary-eyed piano ballad halfway between early Lennon and latter-day Oasis (hardly a mind-blowing amalgam, but there you go). The difference is that the Gallaghers smash ‘n’ grab entire chord sequences and central riffs, while Ashcroft uses his steals as a starting point and migrates the melody through various modulations, evolving through each draft to end up at a place far removed from his point of departure. Case in point: ‘Music Is Power’, a classy slice of white soul with gleaming strings and lowing horns that Ashcroft improvised in his car while humming along to an old Curtis Mayfield nugget.
When Ashcroft stops trying so hard to scrape the belly of heaven (and The Verve were never quite as monumental as they aspired to be), he’s capable of producing some fine music, which is why a statement of intent with big gospel backing vocals like the title tune isn’t half as much fun as ‘Why Not Nothing’, a previously-owned two chord retread driven by a Tamla double-time beat and a filthy Neil Young solo. It’s also that increasingly rare thing in rock ‘n’ roll – an atheist anthem. A rattling opener of some serious intent, it’s enough to revise all previous portraits of the young man as an artist.
Similarly ‘Words Just Get In The Way’ is a lovely Nudie-suited ballad that puts ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ (which, let’s face it, was a great title hitched to a dreary dirge) in the shade, and ‘Sweet Brother Malcolm’ shows him capable of an enchanting third-person ballad based on olde English folk and baroque forms, somewhere between ‘Lady Jane’ era Stones and Soft Machine. Most out-there of all is ‘Why Do Lovers’, which in a previous life might have served as a spangly jumpsuit Neil Diamond epic (“Why…do…lovers… choose others to mirror their fate?”) slipped into a slow set on the Solaris.
Yes, Keys drifts into MOR in extra time (‘Simple Song’ and ‘World Keeps Turning’ are Ashcroft-by-numbers compared to the rest of the material), but for the most part, this record sees the singer fashion something effervescent out of old rock ‘n’ roll, soul and cosmic country threads.