Perhaps every rock star who makes it big reaches a point in their career when they feel emboldened to do what the hell they like. This would certainly help explain the run of solo and collaborative projects from Ride and Oasis veteran Andy Bell over recent years, all of which have yielded music that is eclectic, playful and, more often than not, adventurous.
Third solo outing pinball wanderer follows this pattern, with tracks that demonstrate Bell’s versatility by encompassing spirit-of-Madchester-infused workouts, lush electronica and krautrock. Impressively, the album does this while maintaining coherence, never seeming less than the sum of its parts.
Matters begin with ‘panic attack’, a track that dissects the very 21st-century problem of doom-scrolling and obsessing over things we likely can’t change. For all Bell’s guitar chimes in a Byrds-like fashion, the overall effect is closer to Stereolab, a recurring reference point here, in the track’s sheer insistence.
A cover of The Passions’ 1981 post-punk single ‘I’m In Love With A German Film Star’ – renamed ‘i’m in love…’ because the LP titles eschew capital letters – could easily descend into nostalgia. Instead, carried by vocals by Dot Allison and guitar by Michael Rother of Neu! fame, it’s less hesitant and studied than the original, which was after all the work of a band just starting out, yet achieves the same kind of fragile charm (Bell’s own GLOK remix of the track, incidentally, included on the CD version of the album, is terrific).
‘madder lake deep’ is even more introspective, but with ‘apple green ufo’ the mood shifts as, underpinned by shuffling drums, the LP hits the kind of deceptively laid-back groove The Stone Roses perfected before terminal bombast set in. For all it stretches out over more than eight minutes, it’s a song that never outstays its welcome. The guitar solo near the end, an exercise in leisurely shredding, if that’s not a contradiction, is as convincing an argument as you’ll ever hear for removing unnecessary detail.
As the circular guitar patterns of the instrumental title track give way to the synths of ‘music concrete’ and then the slight and brief but atmospheric ‘the notes you never hear’, there’s a hint the LP may be meandering too much. But then the motorik-infused ‘space station mantra’ brings us back more or less to where we started, which gives the LP a sense of having, with purpose, come full circle. On this form, long may Bell share the results of pinging around in his musical world.
