When Richard Ashcroft announced that The Verve was getting back together for “the love of music”, many expected the one-off festival appearance and a Police-ish tour of old numbers and ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ love. But tickets sold out in minutes and suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the band.
Forth, as the title pneumonic suggests, is The Verve’s fourth studio album. It comes on the back of Urban Hymns, released 11 years ago. Hymns was viscerally romantic, a vast, scenic mélange of instruments and Ashcroft’s dreamy delivery. Songs like ‘Sonnet’ and ‘Lucky Man’ made the band easy to love, while ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ showed us their heart. Ashcroft and Co were masters of the art of making melodies expand in magnitude. Which is what we hoped and expected them to do on their newest release.
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And which is what, thankfully, we find immaculately executed on Forth. Beneath the multi-instrumentalisation and careful harmonies, The Verve’s music is deeply romantic. Ashcroft plays this game well. This is typical Verve territory. The fact that almost all the tracks are over the five minute mark in length only goes to show that this time they’re playing the game a lot harder. Take the almost Stereophonics-ish ‘Noise Epic’ for example. Ashcroft builds a long monologue to his trademark drawl-y chorus, supported by guitarist Nick McCabe’s early ‘90s noise-rock guitar refrains. It’s all about reaching a crescendo and riding the wave for as long as the jam will take it.
There’s so much of the old Verve here that it’s not hard to completely ignore the fact that they’ve been out of action for over a decade. The old Verve showed us that psychedelic strains of noise can go on for minutes on end without purpose or direction and unfortunately, like the rest of their trade that they’ve carried forward since 1997, this too makes its way on to the record. On songs like ‘Rather Be’ and ‘Numbness’, McCabe drags his strings to grandiose arrangements that don’t add much to what these songs achieve in their first three minutes. ‘Numbness’ could’ve been one of the strongest songs on this record, but meanders towards the end in a way that destroys everything the song accomplished by the end of the second verse.
This still is, though, one of the, if not the, most mature Verve records to date. With their prolonged absence, and a catalogue that felt vastly incomplete, Forth is a record you can cherish. See, with The Verve you never quite know when it’s going to end. With a history of breaking up after every album, Forth brings back the band we know and love with the promise that there’s more to come.
Indiecision: B
