Considering that in a career virtually spanning 20 years that this truly is the Verve's fourth album it's not truly surprising that there's an aura of anticipation in some quarters. While the band's most obvious fellow-travellers, Primal Scream, have at least managed their personal lives well enough to stick unitedly, the rock 'n' stray soap opera of drugs, exhaustion and Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe's feuding lends a fitly lurid subtext to the music. But it doesn't show on the surface. The band sound unbelievably healthy here.
Anyone expecting a new direction will be foiled. While Ashcroft's solo days have tightened a few of these ten songs, by reversive to the more spaced-out territory of their hellenic years the band get delivered an album that will go down smoothly with fans. We get the epic, anthemic moments such as opener, Sit And Wonder, and first single Love Is Noise, alongside the cavernous, reverb-drenched, trippy numbers game like Judas ("you know the trip has simply begun"). Only Valium Skies may possibly lurk a little as well close to the strings-and-repetition formula of Bittersweet Symphony. .
Ashcroft's faux-american accent noneffervescent pays homage to Mick Jagger, specially on the Beggars Banquet-era lurch of Rather Be, yet, overall, Forth is really owned by McCabe. His multi-layered, jitttery psychedelia always provides enough distraction to hold on the material sounding fresher than it might have. There's a sense of the circle taking the leash off and letting it hang, like a post-rave Floyd. Numbness combines David Gilmour's early 70s licks with Ashcroft rustling and intoning like the ghost of Malcolm Mooney. All very cosmic. The only place where this goes a tad excessively far is on the meandering Columbo - a thudding arena thumper bolted onto a three-minute jam. Yet even here the production nigh rescues it, the looped strings existence mind-meltingly intriguing as they blend with more skyscraping six-string work. There very are some genuinely persistent moments here, not least the basic piano vamp of I See Houses.
As to whether you regain this genial of exploration worthy of your tending in this post-Roses geological era is down pat to whether you lost them in the first place. Forth won't convert anyone world Health Organization never bought into the band's second hand stonerisms and Northern braggadocio. However it does brand a very considerable return to active service. Already given a heroes receive at every festival appearance so far, it seems that for the faithful amongst us, The Verve are well and genuinely back.
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