Forth
The Verve didn’t achieve mainstream success until Urban Hymns in 1997, but many of the band’s fans – including myself – have just as much an affinity for the earlier material. They had started with big, loud, sprawling shoegaze-flavoured anthemic rock songs, but over time morphed their music into a more classic – and accessible – mold.
Forth combines the best of both worlds: the big and loud (Noise Epic), the lush (Judas), the anthemic (Love is Noise) and a little bit of everything (Rather Be). The songs I’ve mentioned here are some of the best off of this album, but to be honest, it all flows so well – and so organically – that it’s hard to sit back and separate any tracks into rank-order.
Some critics – namely Pitchfork – have derided the album’s outdated approach, referring to them as “dinosaur rockers of the ’00s.” This is a good example of why Pitchfork’s staff writers should all be lobotomized and forced to roam the earth with Kid A implanted into their ear canals playing on repeat for eternity. Just when you think they can’t get any more predictable, they pull another fresh turd out and slap it on the front of their website. (Although, to be fair, they gave the album 5/10, which — for them, anyway — isn’t too shabby.)
So, yeah, anyway: this is a very good album. It’s a bit bloated, yes. But all the Verve albums were. It’s about on par with Urban Hymns, and the song Rather Be gives Lucky Man a run for its money (which is saying a lot, since Lucky Man is one of the greatest songs of the ’90s in my opinion. It’s one of few songs that cuts through my bitter cynicism and self-loathing. Just kidding. But not really.).
The album’s production is generally good, and Richard Ashcroft literally doesn’t seem to age at all. Many singers experience vocal changes over a period of time such as, say, a decade — but you could easily slap Noise Epic somewhere on the tracklisting for A Northern Soul and not realize it was recorded so many years later.
In summary: Is Forth a masterpiece? No. But it’s far better than a typical “festival reunion album” (an album issued by a reunited band to help promote their touring circuit, a la The Stooges’ disastrous The Weirdness last year). You can tell that a lot of craft and care went into this album, and it was approached as the next logical step in The Verve’s career. This is an album that I’ll keep going back to just as often as I’ve been going back to the previous records over the past decade, and although it may not be better than any of the other discs, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s any worse, either. I’m not sure if The Verve are going to stay reunited for very long (it’ll be the third time they’ve broken up), but if they do, I sure hope they don’t wait another 11 years to return with an album as solid as Forth.
