Tom Ewing, refreshingly sane on one of the more puzzling phenomena of Brit-pop: the (cue hushed tones among folks of a certain vintage and haircut) first Stone Roses album. (Weirdly, I probably give more credence to the quiet-pretty-folky parts of the Roses than Ewing does, though I’d still rank the album a 6 instead of a 7.)
You know how people always talk about how in the Old Days you used to buy a record and really concentrate on it and absorb it. I did that with the first Stone Roses album and I strongly remember WANTING to have my life changed by it. The whole narrative around music was to do with hearing these life-changing records, so you felt like you were doing it wrong if you didn’t have those sort of experiences on a regular basis. For indie boys reading the NME was kind of like how reading Cosmo must have been for teenage girls sometimes, except for “Oh god why havent I had an orgasm yet?” read “Oh god why haven’t I heard a Life Changing Record yet?”. But the Stone Roses album doggedly refused to morph from a Pretty Good record into a Great one.
(Ewing‘s entire name-a-band-any-band feature is a fun read.)
RockCritics.com 