Miles Kane - One Man Band

Assessing the musicians that Miles Kane comes co-signed by versus the music he makes himself has always proved something of a head-scratcher. On his collaborative CV sits his tenure alongside Alex Turner in The Last Shadow Puppets and a guest spot on Lana Del Rey’s 2021 LP ‘Blue Banisters’: two of this century’s objectively greatest songwriters. Across his own solo canon, however, the Merseyside musician has settled in a retro-classic lane of indie-rock that tests few boundaries; there’s a solid background of obviously skilled musicianship on fifth LP ‘One Man Band’, but even on the snarl of ‘Never Taking Me Alive’, it all feels very safe. The ‘60s-nodding ‘Heartbreaks (The New Sensation)’, with its romance between a girl with a “vintage Kodak” and a “retro boy” with a cigarette, exemplifies the idea. It’s just all a bit obvious. That said, though Miles might not be breaking any vast new ground with his fifth, there’s an energy to the hopefully-literal ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’ that will inevitably hit hard come tour time, while the album’s title track is a winner, its more unusual guitar lines making the chorus’ anthemic pay off all the better. ‘One Man Band’ has solid moments, but he shouldn’t shut the door to potential collaborators any time soon.