Thursday, 28 August 2008
Four good songs does not an album make...Where have they been?
As an occasional fan of The Verve - I admit, their first few years left me lost in a miasma of swamp-rock - I suppose it’s only when I hear them again, after a tumultuous decade apart, I realise that The Verve are like crazed lovers. They come together briefly, burn brightly, and then fracture again for ever longer before realising that they can’t be without each other, yet they can’t also be together.
They make it look easy, and it isn’t. No one sounds quite like them. This both a good, and a bad thing. After a decade away, The Verve, who were once visionaries miles ahead of the pack, have now been caught up by, and in some cases exceeded by the competition. In many ways, “Forth” resembles the recent Coldplay album : epic, visionary, propelled by ascending and plentiful guitar textures, by eager, aspirant rhythms.
This isn’t the kind of last gasp, pisspoor reformation album some bands make, in a desperate attempt to fool you and themselves that they aren’t a nostalgia act, that they aren’t just making music of ever shrinking quality to declining audiences out of habit, that they aren’t just tired old journeymen plodding along. Even when The Verve weren’t moving, they were moving towards something else.
In many ways, this album sounds like ten years of songs that The Verve have been working on, having selected the very cream of that crop, released as a sort of Best Of 1998-2008 compilation. It’s that’s strong. The album starts assertively with “Sit And Wonder”, which kicks off 7 minutes of strident jamming interspersed with melody. It’s followed up by a one-two sucker punch of the brave and instant classic that is “Love Is Noise”. This bold, confident opening makes you think that it’s going to be perfect from here.
Sadly, things take a dip with “Rather Be”, which is the kind of thing The Verve excel at : a plodding groove, cod mysticism, epic strings, that wants desperately to go somewhere and take off, but circles the tarmac. It’s not a good sign that you want to press the FFWD button on song three. “Judas” is also a slight token of song writing. Maybe a decade as a solo artist saw Ashcroft lose his fire slightly. It’s not inaccurate to say that some of his solo material far far surpasses some of this material. Not to put too fine on it, at least four songs - the aforementioned two, and the following “Numbness” and the prosaic “I See Houses” - are dull plods that fail to capture the bands majesty or potential. The material which hinted at the greatness everyone wanted them to achieve - “History”, “The Drugs Don’t Work” - simply isn’t here.
After a dragging middle act, it’s only when “Valium Skies” (possibly the best Suede song title they never recorded) appears that the record is lifted out of a mire of formless jams atypical of a much-lesser-talented Zeppelin : that and closer “Appalachian Springs” are fabulous slices of epic mountain-climbing stadium rock that peel back the convention of reality to do the things that truly great music does : it challenges the convention, it shows the promise and possibility of more than this tired life, it unweaves the oppression of work and shows how we could be. Sadly though, four great songs that bookend four fairly tiresome, plodding jam numbers, At the heart of it, if Coldplay are Pink Floyd, then The Verve are Tangerine Dream : masters of creating soundscapes, building and holding fragments of riffs and exploring them like some kind of late Sixties instrumental wonderkids, but perhaps best not suited to be hailed as the new saviours of rock, or returning heroes. Simply put, The Verve don’t have the melodic skill of some of their imitators and contemporaries to craft a consistent set of memorable, brilliant songs. Which is a tragedy, because on the four superior songs here, they clearly can still do it with as much power and majesty as they ever did : they just can’t seem to do it particularly often. And four good songs does not a great album make.
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