Reviews for Beautiful Thing (2016) were mixed but mostly upbeat, landing somewhere between “welcome back, lads” and “nice to see you haven’t forgotten where the wah-wah pedal is.” Critics enjoyed the unmistakable Roses groove, John Squire’s swirl of wah-wah and reverse-soaked guitar textures, and Ian Brown’s assured, strut-heavy vocals. Skeptics, meanwhile, grumbled that it sounded a bit too much like Brown’s solo work and lacked the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the band’s glory days. Verdict? A solid, enjoyable return—less “world-changing anthem,” more “promising warm-up act,” teasing the idea that a genuinely great third album might still be lurking somewhere behind the amps.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Beautiful Thing? First up - it's seven minutes long. And one second. This is the blissed out, top down coastal drive of a single after the revved up look-at-me return.
Light footed guitar riffs from Squire lend themselves nicely to lyrics that could have come from Brown's debut, Unfinished Monkey Business. The lead guitar gets its sun-drenched show off moment about four and a half minutes in though.
There are bits of Fools Gold in the bassline. And the drums. It's definitely more first album than Second Coming. Brown has his paws all over this one.
Does all of this mean they've gone back to the source?
The Led Zeppelin-infused sound the Squire tried to fuse into the band before the split has gone a bit - the backwards guitar effects are still there in spades though. But its old Roses territory here. Rolling drums, heavy effects pedal intro, Mani's guiding bass, Brown's semi-prophetic whisperings.
John Lennon gets a name check. Brown pokes fun at himself and his much maligned vocal style.
Beautiful Thing stretches out into the distance with the confidence of a band who (still) aren't that bothered about pleasing critics - they're doing it for the fans. And after all this time, for themselves too.
Oddly, the Stone Roses seem to be making music devoid of the shackles of huge expectation. Maybe that comes more from outside the band than inside.
Still defiant. Still in the groove. Still making music other bands can only dream of even in an arguably lower gear than at their peak.
Reviewed by M.E.N
------------------------------------------------------------
The Stone Roses: Beautiful Thing review – solid rather than earth shattering.
The second comeback single from the Stone Roses has one big thing in its favour – it’s a whole lot better than All for One. But is that it's only merit?
Perhaps the politest thing you can say about the Stone Roses’ comeback single All for One is that it met with a mixed response. Many people who heard it seemed faintly aghast, or a bit mortified on the band’s behalf, although a certain kind of dutiful fortysomething bloke, for whom it’s an article of faith that the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut is the greatest album ever made, loudly defended it. You can hear them bellowing along to the song as though it were made of the same impermeable stuff as I Am the Resurrection or She Bangs the Drums in fan videos of the band’s recent gig in Halifax, warming up for their Manchester stadium shows. Others seemed delighted for other reasons: if you always thought the Stone Roses’ unimpeachable genius was a load of arrant cobblers, or, at the very least, a reputation built on pretty slender foundations, well, here was some pretty compelling evidence for the prosecution.
If Beautiful Thing isn’t a single that’s going to convince the naysayers, it’s at least a substantial improvement on its predecessor. That sounds like faint praise – frankly, anything you could listen to without being gripped by the fear you might die of embarrassment before it ends would be an improvement on its predecessor – but Beautiful Thing is a decent enough song. It does a lot of things the Stone Roses are famous for doing. There are guitars played through a wah-wah pedal over a breakbeat, in the manner of Fool’s Gold. It opens with what sounds like a burst of the song played backwards, in the style of the tracks that used to pad out their 12in singles in the late 80s – Guernica, Simone, Full Fathom Five – and there’s a moment about four and half minutes in where Ian Brown’s vocals are submerged with reversed reverb, which seems to be a nod to Don’t Stop. The lyrics deal with a lot of Brown’s preoccupations: Jesus, sisters, glancing references to drugs, stern admonishments of shadowy forces that apparently threaten to “steal the vibe”.
What it doesn’t have is the hazy mysteriousness of Fool’s Gold, a track that abandoned the standard verse-chorus structure in favour of something that recalled the exploratory approach of Can: it was pretty audacious to release a single whose vocal melody was secondary to the cyclical, unchanging bassline. Here, despite the track’s length – seven minutes – and the extended instrumental passages in which John Squire’s guitar playing sounds as fluid and effortless as ever, everything seems much more straightforward: the hook is the chorus. In fact, for all the nods to the band’s back catalogue, what Beautiful Thing really sounds like isn’t the Stone Roses in their imperial phase so much as something that might have turned up on one of Ian Brown’s subsequent solo albums: solid, rather than earth shattering.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Stone Roses New Single Beautiful Thing
After waiting two decades for new music from Manchester’s Stone Roses before May’s release of All For One, we now have a second new single in less than a month after another song, Beautiful Thing, had a surprise release at midnight last Thursday. While the release of All For One had a fairly mixed reaction once the fans euphoria at finally hearing new music had died down, with most of the criticism aimed at the nursery rhyme sing-along lyrics, I said at the time that it felt like it was a teaser that hinted there’d be better to come before the Summer gigs and it’s likely people will be a lot happier with the groove led Beautiful Thing.
While the previous single had a real Britpop vibe to it, the latest release takes it’s lead from the period between the band’s two albums and gives an indication of where the band might have gone following the releases of Fools Gold and One Love in 89/90 had they not got bogged down in the court cases which led to the five year gap between their albums and their ultimate split. Beautiful Thing has a solid shuffling groove throughout with Mani’s bass blending into Reni’s breakbeat while John Squire feeds his guitar through a wah wah pedal that takes the sound back to the early 90’s. Ian Brown’s lyrics here are much improved with the sort of messianic/religious references he’s famous for present (it opens with “There was no crucifixion. Just lies to steal your mind”) and there’s clearly an influence from Brown’s solo stuff present after All For One had John Squire’s fingerprints all over it. And while the song may still fall short of the highs of their Silvertone years, it’s clearly a step forward and continues to whet the appetite for a potential third album.
Review by
Tony Considine for IUM
