Ever constructed around our hero's robust tenor and rattling acoustic, then adorned with A-grade orchestration, it inescapably evokes Urban Hymns.
What resonates the most from the ten songs on offer here is Ashcroft’s unbridled love of songwriting. He injects the ten songs here with a musical joie de vivre that, while certainly manifested across its precursor albums, achieves full, fantastic bloom on Natural Rebel.
This is a rootsy album of pedal steel guitars, orchestral flourishes, and rather sweet songs of a happy life. When an artist has given us soundtracks to our youth and failings, we afford them an enormous amount of goodwill and do not begrudge their good fortune. Natural Rebel is not without it's shine.
This is the closest he has ever got to recreating the mesmeric intensity and emotional release of Urban Hymns. He has thankfully ditched the electronic effects that tried to lend 2016's These People a vestige of pop modernity.
Though Natural Rebel has its moments, it all feels a bit staid and stale: not so much rock’n’roll rebellion as conventional cliché, both musical and lyrical.
A sack full of ‘Sonnets’, this fifth solo album finds the Wigan wonder sounding almost like a pastiche of himself.
Natural Rebel, sadly, is paint-by-numbers singer-songwriting. For a 10-track album, it feels hideously overindulgent – only two songs fall under the four-minute mark, and those still feel drawn out by plodding, bog-standard riffs.
On his latest solo release, The Verve’s frontman Richard Ashcroft sounds as worn out and beaten as the genre he blossomed from. It takes a special kind of man to release an album so littered with entitlement, but Ashcroft managed that with absolute ease on Natural Rebel; perhaps all those days he spent looking at himself in the mirror and doing cocaine to pretend he’s cool have caught up with the once idolised ... read more
TRACK LIST:
All My Dreams (7.2)
Birds Fly (8.0)
Surprised by the Joy (7.5)
That's How Strong (7.0)
Born to Be Strangers (7.7)
That's When I Feel It (7.3)
We All Bleed (6.0)
A Man in Motion (6.8)
Streets of Amsterdam (6.3)
Money Money (7.2)