- Label
- Polydor Records
- Release date
- 16th June 2008
- Genre
- Indie rock
- Buy this album
- Buy CD
Dull return of inexplicably popular rock journeymen
After The Music’s eponymous 2002 debut album of The Verve-meets-Led Zeppelin sludge-indie was rapturously received by the music press, the Leeds band found themselves touring the US with Coldplay while still in their teens. Such a precipitous ascent invariably has a dark side, and singer Robert Harvey recently talked on the band’s website of receiving professional help for problems with drug and alcohol addiction and depression.
Such candidness is laudable, but while The Music's third studio album is equally honest, it has little else going for it. The band have largely abandoned their earlier indie-dance leanings for a bludgeoning strain of blues-metal powered by the kind of grim, gruelling riffs favoured by late-period Oasis. Tracks like Get Through It and Vision sink beneath lumpen rhythms and the hapless Harvey's gruff bark, while drugs songs The Spike and, um, Drugs are handicapped by horribly literal lyrics. It all adds up to a decided triumph of perspiration over inspiration.
More to try: Oasis: Be Here Now The Verve: A Northern Soul Kasabian: Kasabian
