Brett Anderson - Wilderness Review

There are times when setting and context are everything, and so it proves to be with Brett Anderson's second solo offering, Wilderness. It's an album that works much better savoured alone in your front room than it does played live in a concert venue.

Some of this is because listening to the album alone, the songs that comprise Wilderness aren't competing against more familiar old favourites you know Brett will play after the interval. On the other hand, it's also because Wilderness is a very personal, very intimate album and that means it works best when it's just Brett, alone on the piano (apart from a cellist), and you, basking in one another's company....full text Brett Anderson has reached a creative menopause. After being brilliantly lampooned by Bill Bailey, it's impossible to take this maudlin drudgery seriously. Wilderness could overtake Zero 7 as the record to go to sleep to, but Anderson's rhymes in 'Clowns' ('frowns', 'towns') would keep you wincing all night....full text Masturbation and cocaine addiction may, generally speaking, be considered the highest forms of self-indulgence, but they’ve got nothing on a Brett Anderson solo album. Once Britpop’s snake-hipped pretend-bisexual clown prince, Anderson is a far more introspective character these days – the sort who’d rather don a rollneck sweater and retire solemnly to the piano in his shed than hit the suburban streets and get psycho for sex and glue.

Over the past decade, his decline – from Suede’s split to The Tears to an increasingly indifferent solo career – has been pretty terminal, and this album of po-faced, lovelorn piano ballads will do little to change his fortunes. Sweeping strings and gently-plucked acoustic guitars weep sycophantically in the foreground on ‘A Different Place’ and Brett’s ivory-tinkling – on the likes of ‘Chinese Whispers’ and ‘The Empress’ – rarely progresses past the My First Stab At ‘Imagine’ songbook, each tune barely distinguishable from the next. Need you even ask, meanwhile, about the lyrics?...full text