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It seems a bit odd having to write about the Verve again so long after they split (it may be six years but somehow it seems a lot longer). Not least because although the group officially called it a day in 1998, their spirit had arguably died some years earlier.
Let's not make any bones about this, at the beginning, Wigan's finest were a bloody magnificent band as anyone who owns their superb debut "A Storm In Heaven" will tell you. Treading the fine line between the loose groove of the Stone Roses and the Charlatans and the sky-scraping sonics of early Ride, they came up with some damn fine tunes, as evidenced on here by their swaggering debut "All In The Mind" and the still amazing ten years on "Slide Away", both languid and laid-back but with a ferocious self-belief which set the Verve streets ahead of their contemporaries like Northside and Chapterhouse.
It was with 1995's "This Is Music" that the Verve really hit their zenith - ferocious, angry and anthemic, it encapsulated everything that was so great about them. When Richard Ashcroft snarled "I stand accused just like you/Of being born without a silver spoon", it was like the thinking Britpop man's manifesto.
Unfortunately, it also proved to be all downhill from thereon in. The group's next two singles, "History" and "On Your Own", like the album they were culled from ("A Northern Soul"), were...well, okay but there was a feeling that the sense of self-belief had been tempered. Okay so the arrival of string sections might just have been a bit of a giveaway but these two songs plodded where they should have strode and perhaps the initial break-up of the group towards the end of 1995 wasn't that much of a surprise in retrospect.
1997, of course, saw them back in business with the "Urban Hymns" album but really, although the songs on here far outdid their predecessors commercially, they were poor relations with the pompous "Bittersweet Symphony" and the mawkish "The Drugs Don't Work" seeing the group blunder straight into the dreaded indie MOR territory which set the trend for Ashcroft's hideously dull solo career. Only the strident "Lucky Man" really stands out from this era.
It's an all-too-common story these days sadly - the group who promised so much simply getting subsumed by the mainstream and becoming a parody of their former selves. "This Is Music" is maybe worth getting for the old bits but really, if I was you, I'd track down "A Storm In Heaven" and the early singles on Ebay or Amazon and give the rest of the Verve's career a wide berth. Arguably like they themselves should have done.
Rating: 5/10
Reviewed by Andy James
