Ian Brown – Music of the Spheres

After a pretty awful couple of years, which culminated in a jail sentence for an air rage incident, Ian Brown finally seems to have got his act together. The third solo album from the self-styled King Monkey is easily his best so far, an accomplished collection of baggy grooves and ambient soundscapes that may well give the former Stone Roses frontman a new creative lease of life. Self-discipline has never been his strongest point and some may be irritated by the dense tapestry of portentous space imagery and unfocused fretwork that fuels most of these sprawling songs. Even so, if it doesn’t quite recapture his former glories, Music of the Spheres proves that Brown is still a long way from musical redundancy.