Richard Ashcroft - Break the Night with Colour

After an absence of four years (is it really that long?) Richard Ashcroft returns with 'Break the Night with Colour', the first single to be lifted from his new album 'Keys to the World', declaring that he feels like Jesus.  But don't break out the champagne just yet, unfortunately he sounds like Robbie Williams.  What happened to the ethereal, moody tones of before?  Instead we are given a track that sounds like a soppy, under-rehearsed Coldplay and left feeling thoroughly cheated.  Gone is the trippy and passionate confidence that made Ashcroft so alluring in the first place, to be replaced by lacklustre sentiment.  Hope can be taken from the trademark mellow drama that runs through every Ashcroft composition, but the fact remains that this is like a Richard Ashcroft song, minus the man himself.   

Claire Evans