Not moving ‘Forth’

Bands who were the most important of their heyday often seem lackluster after that moment is over, even if their new music is great by most standards.

Such is the case with The Verve, the most sophisticated and eloquent of the Britpop bands during the genre’s 1993-1997 lifespan. Although the group’s new album Forth is hardly bad, it seems out of place in the 21st century.

Britpop created some of the smartest political and working/middle-class commentary ever set to music, and, for whatever reason, since 1997, no one has been able to recapture its influence and brilliance.

To The Verve’s credit, they recognize this problem and settle for introspective lyrics rather than the commentary on public life featured in their ’90s material. But in a far cry from their that work, few of these lyrics are original.

On 1997’s Urban Hymns, the band wrote about finding God in a phone box (“Come On”) and feeling feverish after finally standing naked in front of a person you love (“Lucky Man”). But here on tracks like “Love Is Noise,” they now sing that “Love is noise, love is pain, love is these blues I’m singing again (again, again, again, again, again)” and “Feelings, only feelings, just worthless, so I let ’em go.”

The instrumentals, on the other hand, rarely stray from the old-school Verve’s style. Not that that’s a bad thing – the band has plenty of chemistry, lots of their trademark atmospheric rock sound and some killer guitar lines. But for a band known on its previous albums for making rock that was profound and ahead of its time, most of Forth’s sound comes off as vacuous.
 
The album’s one real stunner is “Noise Epic,” a dirty and ethereal update of the band’s shoegaze roots. It takes several surprise turns, ranging from shimmering to fuzzy, without sounding old. If every track on Forth were like this, it would be one of the best albums of the decade.

Forth has some good music, but it doesn’t even touch The Verve’s previous efforts that focused on discovering love after alienation and becoming whole through sound, and their music doesn’t have the grip and power of their Britpop days.

The days of Britpop are over, and so are The Verve’s.