Track Listing

1. Breaking Into Heaven
2. Driving South
3. Ten Storey Love Song
4. Daybreak
5. Your Star Will Shine
6. Straight To The Man
7. Begging You
8. Tightrope
9. Good Times
10. Tears
11. How Do You Sleep
12. Love Spreads

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2505 in Music
• Released on: 1999-03-20
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds
• Running time: 73 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Their debut made them the new Beatles and Stones rolled into one, and Second Coming was five years in the making. Accordingly, the anticipation was immense, and when the product seemed on first listen to be a very long, very protracted Led Zeppelin guitar solo--courtesy of the excessively well-practised John Squire--The Stone Roses convincingly punctured their own myth. Nevertheless, some of Second Coming is quite good: "Breaking Into Heaven" is appealingly pompous, showing that the Roses at least had a handle on the nature of their own import, and better still, had the ability to pull it off. "Love Spreads" and "Ten Storey Love Song" are imbued with the arrogance--and thankfully the tunes--of old. And the rest? Well, if you've ever heard John Squire's next band, The Seahorses, you'll know what to expect. Seldom has the guitar solo been so accomplished, or so dull. --Louis Pattison

CD Description
The title is a joking reference to the messianic anticipation that built up in the years between the Manchester, England rock band's 1989 debut--which Britain's New Musical Express magazine ranked as the greatest album of the '80s--and this 1995 follow-up. It's also a description of the Stone Roses' sound, a sort of second coming of '60s and '70s blues-rock, re-born with a funk beat. Back in '89 it sounded like a revolution, and it was: crossing Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan with club music, it helped set the template for all British alternative rock to follow, from Blur to the revamped U2. Lenny Kravitz is among the Americans who owes a debt.
SECOND COMING consolidates that sound with a see-sawing mix of hard-rock driving songs--with chunky electric guitar riffs and big beats--and acoustic anthems that immediately sound like they've been on the radio for a dozen years or more. The latter group includes "Ten Storey Love Song", a devotional ballad with a Dylan-esque melody, and "Your Star Will Shine", a psychedelic folk ditty that would have fit on an early Bee Gees album. "Good Times" is one of the big-beat numbers, and although it starts out sounding like a very blue Eric Burdon,it builds into a classic shouted-out blues-rock chorus, thekind on which FM radio thrived in the 1970s. "Tears" follows a Zeppelin-esque arc from acoustic to electric folk. Which, no doubt, is the exact route a lot of hard-rock devotees think any second coming should follow.

Customer Reviews

Ignore The Critics Make up your own Mind
When this came out it had very mixed reviews so when I bought it shortly afterwards having only heard Love Spreads and Your star Will Shine I was prepared for dissapointment.

However sitting in a darkened room with this on the headphones certainly told me all I needed to know about this great LP. From the very start of Breaking Into Heavens weird and wonderful middle of a swamp intro the Roses have your attention. Breaking into Heaven is a totally different sound to the Byrd like sound on the first album it's darker heavier but by no means poorer. After a tantalising 11 minute beginning you go into Driving South which has been used many a time on TV as background music, Soccer am ,Top Gear etc perfect driving guitar music with ian Brown rasping vocals telling us that he sure as hell aint pretty and he sure as hell can't sing-bit harsh but a nice twist on the usual self confidence. From here we get the sublime Ten storey Love Song which as many have said could have been slotted easily onto the debut LP. The track after this Daybreak changes the feel of the CD yet again fronm almost poppy to almost funky-love the slow down speed up tempo change and simplistic name checking of destinations 'from new york city to addis ababaaaa'. Nice tune which takes us onto the slower more thoughtful Your Star will Shine which is nice without blowing you away. Straight to the man is a bit more up tempo and is again nice without pulling up any trees, what it does do is keep the flow of the LP going.

Now the Roses being the Roses they don't settle for letting the whole package peter out they come back with a real blaster the high tempo technoesque Beggin You another track heard a lot outside the confines of the Cd. The next track Tightrope is a lovely acoustic number which you find yourself singing a lot after a few plays. After this we get back to the Guitar Rock with john squire proving why he was held in such high esteem as a guitarist. Firstly Good Times picks up the tempo again followed by my personal favourite the awesome 'Tears' which starts slowly with a nice bit of acoustic guitar in the background and then goes all electric on us. "Ive seen the future in the tracks of your tears' sings a wise sounding Ian forseeing the end of many a relationship!

'I've seen your severed head at a banquet for the dead all wrapped up for dinner looked so fine' How Do You Sleep is classic Stone roses with a fantastically acidic lyric that grabs you by the nads right from the start. Great song and fairly close to the style of the first album but yet a bit darker and less optimistic.

That's brings me onto the last track the majestic Love Spreads which was released as a single prior to the album release. The first time I heard this on Radio 1 (i think) I had tears in my eyes because i had waited so long for new material from these guys and they came back with something so different yet still so 'them' and yet so amazingly good.

In short (if you can't be arsed to go through my rambling review) if you liked the first CD or if you half like the idea of the Roses, their mystique and great guitar music buy this CD and treat it as a complete work not as individual tracks. You will not be dissapointed.

Critics..whadda they know?
You just can't win with critics can you. When this came out they pretty much gave it a right old pasting, laying into John Squire for being a self indulgent fretw***** with a Led Zep fixation. Then again, they would've slagged the Roses off if they'd come out with something similar to their debut.
Granted, there are strong echoes of Jimmy Page here but who cares? It seems it's OK to rip off The Beatles, the Stones, The Who and The Kinks but a hard rock band...God forbid!!! Anyway, this is generally a damn good album and had it been the Roses debut or by any of their contemporaries it would've been been much better received.

As near to the second coming as you can get!!!
O.K. We all know about how good the first album was, but this is the follow up to "one of the best albums ever". This album took an agonising 5 years to conceive - 5 years!!! That's half a decade!!!! That's 1/20 of a Century!!!! Some band's careers don't even last for 5 years. So, the big question, what is the second coming actually like? Well, I have never been disappointed with this album. The first 3 songs, Breaking into Heaven, Driving South and Ten storey love song, pick up where "The Stone Roses" left off in that golden summer of 1989. Tunes!! That's what it all boils down to and top ones at that. As this album progresses through it's many twists and turns, it becomes a confused and flawed beast, but comes out on top with it's 5 stars intact. How can an album get a 5 star review, when it contains songs as poor as the laughable "straight to the man" and the limp "How do you sleep"??? This album contains 12 songs, 10 of which easily stand along side anything from the first album, which is commonly deemed one of the best albums ever. Infact, I'll even stick my neck out and state that "Begging you" is better than anything by any band. The Stone Roses nearly killed themselves and each other during the making of this album. If you listen closely, you can clearly hear the tension, confusion, paranoia, drugs, fights, tears and insecurity that dominated their lives during the studio sessions. But at the end of the day The Stone Roses came out on top with a decent album. Don't listen to negativity in relation to this beautifly crazed beast of an album. If people don't like this album, it's because they just haven't got the time to get into it. But once this album hits you, it won't stop sounding better with every listen - even with two dodgy tracks. Buy it, give it a chance and get into it.