Ian Brown

Ian Brown's fourth album, Solarized, features a bounty of influences overflowing from each song, making for a varied, yet remarkably cohesive, album. Anglophiles will start with "Keep What Ya Got" (co-written with Oasis' Noel Gallagher), but the smart money is on "Time Is My Everything" and "The Sweet Fantastic."

The beefy, atmospheric techno-pop on the fifth solo album from this former Stone Roses
singer can be seductive in small doses. But most of Solarized sounds like a so-so Portishead
record with perfect cheekbones, an expensive haircut and rock-star airheadedness even
Noel Gallagher couldn't manage: "A desert rose cascading waterfalls/The sands of time will
blow my mind."