Four Winds by the Lightning Seeds is often seen as something of an illegitimate child in the discography of the hit Liverpudlian band – partly, because it was never meant to be a Lightning Seeds record at all.

By the end of the 90’s, it was felt by those in the band that the group had run its course after the commercial failure of the ahead of its time, excellent but commercially unloved Tilt album which had seen the music go into a more dance direction.

In 2004, Ian Broudie, for all intents and purposes the man who is the Lightning Seeds, released a genuinely excellent solo album, Tales Told under his own name. It marked a step change from the music he had been associated with throughout the tenure of the band, with the synths and saccharine pop replaced by a stripped down sound, almost a hybrid between indie and folk, released on Deltasonic.

A review by Allmusic at the time said: “Enlisting the Coral and Zutons (two young bands he was producing for) to help out was a brilliant move. Together they craft a record that, for once, plays the sad songs sad, instead of bright and shiny, and lets Broudie escape the world of pop in favour of something smaller and more human.”

Four Winds, released in 2009 was meant to be the successor to this album, released under Ian’s name but Universal, the record label he was on at this time, insisted it was to be released as the Lightning Seeds, for it was during a time where many ‘nostalgia’ acts from the 1990s were making returns to different degrees of success.

Much like on Tales Told, Ian’s ‘band’ wasn’t the Lightning Seeds, but he was helped out by the entire band that is The Coral with instrumentation, with James Skelly writing two tracks with him.

But the problem was, no matter how much the sound was changed to sound like an evolution of the Lightning Seeds, it simply wasn’t that and the end result was a terrific little album but under the wrong name. With the wrong name came different expectations and the record did not do that well. After all, it was Ian’s reflection on a decade of divorce, heartache and loss rather than melancholic synth pop of the highest degree.

The title track on the album, originally conceived as a poem about the loss of his brother, Rob, is a five-minute haunting wonder and lead single Ghosts is very much a Beach Boys 60’s throwback in its sound but a genuine treat, as is the very clever stop-motion music video. The final track, I Still Feel the Same, is summed up best with: “There’s still a little piece of me, somewhere in my memory, I love the world for being strange, and times have changed I think I still feel the same.”

It is an outstanding album well worth a listen. Just please, imagine it’s an Ian Broudie solo album as it always should have been.