Second Coming is the second and - as it turned out - final album by The Stone Roses and was first released in 1994. The album was highly anticipated but met with a decidedly mixed reception that mostly bordered on the lukewarm. The Stone Roses were truly great at their mighty best but they were undone in the end by the fatal combination of drugs and laziness. Their debut 1989 album was a perfect pop bulletin pitched somewhere in between rave and The Byrds but their failure to capitalise on the success of this record much sooner more or less spelled the end for these scruffy but (Ian Brown aside) incredibly talented Mancunian rascals. Second Coming simply wasn't as good ..  Read the complete review

Was it it worth the wait and the endless bickering? Probably not. The album starts off well enough with the sonic guitar fest of "Breaking into heaven", and peaks with the tuneful "Ten story love song", which hinted at a more tuneful past. Unfortunately the is too much self indulgence from John Squire, whose exquisite guitar solos take up too much time. It was as if he was conducting a materclass. The album is very different to the first one, more distored guitar, and even programmed drum loops on "Begging you", the the overall effect is a poor mans Led Zepplin. A shame, an album that promised everything, and delivered very little. ...  Read the complete review

After you've written one of the best albums ever, it's always going to be a tad tricky producing a follow up that pleases everybody. Suffice to say that with Second Coming, The Stone Roses didn't. I'm one of the seemingly rare people that has a lot of affection for it however. More than an acceptable quota of average tracks, I'll admit, but Paul Weller's been making a career out of that for years, so you shouldn't be too harsh. Breaking Into Heaven kicks off proceedings. Eventually. I'm not quite sure why there's 4 and a half minutes of strange jungle sounds preceding the main action, but after the first listen and thought of ...  Read the complete review

After over 5 years of waiting, the record company in charge finally told the Stone Roses to produce an album, and this was it. You can see it's rushed in places: Daybreak is just a loose jam (but a great one at that- if only there was more time to it!), Straight to the Man is something that would have fitted into Ian Brown's lo-fi debut album, Unfinished Monkey Business, without an eyebrow raised, and How Do You Sleep? just seems like a half-baked idea of a song that never takes off or lands. Ian Brown has since said that the band were just tired after so much media interest (especially with the court case releasing them from their 'prohibitive' previous ...  Read the complete review

Second Coming has in the past received critical reviews, but this is in no small part due to camparison with the Stone Roses first, self-titled album. Yet comparing the two isn't really fair - the albums are simply different. What remains the same is the thumping rhythm section of Mani and Reni, whose bass and drums, respectively, are almost incomparably brilliant. They provide a swaggering groove, a sound personifying the band itself, over which Ian Brown and John Squire characterise the songs. This is where the difference between the first and second album predominantly lies. This song was written almost exclusively by guitarist Squire, rather than the ...  Read the complete review