MOG

How do you a review a record for a band whose previous work you admired so much over the years that when you look at their catalog, you are really looking back at the events in your own life, proof of how music can get grafted onto us and lodged within us so deeply that the music becomes synonymous with who we are.

Case in point with Verve’s fourth record, Forth. To say that this release was anticipated by the music world is to stretch the very notion of patience. Ever since the promise found in certain songs on "Urban Hymns" and three near disastrous Richard Ashcroft solo records, a new record from the Verve is about as hopeful to me as my middle age encroaching self is capable of getting these days.

So is it any good or not? And I say like with everything else, that all depends, because while there are several worthwhile tracks on here, longtime fans can’t help but be a bit disappointed, but will find enough to reconstruct that world, where a grip on sanity wasn’t always guaranteed, and we couldn’t have been further from knowing who we were.

The first time I heard the Verve it was back in 1992, a sophomore in College, The Verve EP came to the radio station, and I had enough copies of NME and Melody Maker lying around my dorm room to recognize the name, and knew that these guys were going to be great, gods even, and if the English Press couldn’t come up with enough hyperbole to convince me, there was that cover, of a girl, probably on drugs, spinning in the middle of a room messy enough to be my own at the time, a single dormer with cigarette butts and beer cans everywhere. I was used to a little squalor about as much as the girl spinning on the cover was.

But what I was unprepared for was how much I fell for that record, Listening to "Man Called Sun" at two am after a heavy night was akin to hearing what Pink Floyd or the Dead might have sounded to the hippies back in 67, stretched out leisurely, the EP had jams that painted a lived-in psychedelic world, one entirely of their own creation. In reality they were aping all sorts of folks, too many to list on paper, but to my addled brain back then they were everything.

I heard A Storm in Heaven a few years later from my T-Rex fanatic friend Kris. Kris said it was his make out album, the one he would play when he brought girls back from seeing some third rate bar band at Frank’s Hot Dogs. The Verve seemed to inhabit their own world even more so then, the boundaries and walls of this world getting louder and more uncomfortable. Then there was the stellar B Sides Collection No Come Down and I remember the acoustic version of "Make it Till Monday" was on my walkman, and I played it until the tape got all warped. It was blessed out and blue, stoned and elegantly wasted, and back then Richard Ashcroft seemed to sweat charisma.

I hardly heard "A Northern Soul" when it came out in 1995, but it wasn’t until "Urban Hymns" came out in 1997 when I fell fully in love with both records.

For me the almost self help vibe of both of those records seem to really gel with where I was at in my life, and it seemed like the band was taking its victory lap. Tracks like "Lucky Man" and "Velvet Morning" on Urban Hymns announced their newfound optimism on their sleeves and with lyrics to yell out to like "Born a little damaged man, look what they made" and through these songs I found a kindred spirit in these easy answers to life’s biggest questions.

I hope that at least one of these songs chart and get these guys some hard earned scratch. Their previous hit, "Bitter Sweet Symphony", yielded them exactly zero royalties, due to a sample nicked from a Rolling Stone song, "The Last Time", so Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones manager at the time, got all the royalties from that ‘hit’.

"Sit and Wonder" makes a fine start, a shuffling stadium ready opener, one when played next to their finer moments hide some of the weaknesses that repeated listens eventually reveal, but the chorus, sweeping and all encompassing rouses the whole psychedelic monster up from its slumber.

The Single "Love is Noise" takes some getting used to. hell you practically have to ignore that pratty cat call of a chorus, a sound not unlike a pelican being hit with one of those Whack A Mole mallets found at County Fairs, used to punch down Moles that periodically pop up from pot holes with lights flashing , yeah, it’s that annoying.

But once you ignore that awful cat call, the song itself, with its call and response refrain of "I was blind, couldn’t see" and some kind of vague protest to China, "if these feet in ancient times these shoes were made from China", evoking, William Blake’s, "And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green."

B Side Mover is a reworking of the 1997 version, but its all bluster and cock of the walk in the right direction its assuredly braggadocio, but it has the chops and the rhythm section to back it up. It’s also better than any other song on Forth, lending credibility to the whole reunion, though that depends on your mood.

"Judas", with its track length up to the seven minute mark, lovingly meanders in the previous pool that The Verve EP and Storm in Heaven swam in, and because of that alone, its my favorite track. Its still a treat to linger in this world, to know that this can happen, that Nick McCabe and Richard Ashcroft can still get together and create this otherworldly magic. And barring a few awful lyrics, "The trip has just begun" for example, makes up for the positively cringe worthy lines like "A latte, double shot for Judas." Each time I listen to that last lyric, it never fails to throw me out of the soundscape, so much so that I have to bury it enough to still make it one of the best songs on this it- could-have-been-so-much-worse record.

"Rather Be" has the same propulsive melody line as "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and for the brief moments while the chorus is playing I get a twinge of bitter nostalgia wishing that this record could be as good as the others, but feeling grateful for the time all the same.

But that leaves us with the misfires: The positively catatonic drudgery that is the somnambulist "Numbness." The vague sound of the band playing with a paint kit, painting a monster not even the "Verve" can crawl their way out of in "Noise Epic",
The lumbering go-nowhere "Colombo", whose sound bows back to their first full length record, A Storm in Heaven but whereas the tracks on that record created a tapestry of sound, a distinct sound whose more pointed songs told stories and the ones that didn’t faded successfully into the back ground, but "Colombo" does neither.

It’s as if someone turned on a tape recorder during an in between song moment in the studio and hit record. It shares many of the faults of this record, notably that while the ideas are interesting, engrossing even, reminding us of an earlier time long enough to warrant a repeat listen, and songs that only have a four minute shelf life are stretched out to passed the seven minute mark.

It’s a record to lose yourself in, for sure, but a record that you might not be able to find your way out of. And while occasionally, as on "Valium Skies", "Sit and Wonder", "Judas", and closer "Appalachian Strings" brings us around one last time, leaving us wanting more rather than less, the rest of the record could have been left in the can, relegated to b-sides.

One thing’s for sure, "Forth" would have made one hell of an EP, one to match that moment, when I, unbeknownst to me at the time, was handed a band that would follow me kicking and screaming into adulthood.