A Northern Soul

I really liked A Northern Soul. I think it has been quite a while since i have heard anything of the britpop variety on this project so this album was a pretty nice return to that for me. My favorite part about this album is easily how melodic it sounds. I guess it is where the shoegaze tag comes in for this album but this album definitely felt like it had a very relaxing sense of noise to it. I also thought that Richard Ashcroft's vocals are just perfect for this kind of music since it adds to the melodic nature so well. It is also interesting to hear Liam Gallagher add some hand claps on the song History. It can drag on a little bit but i still enjoyed this album quite a lot.
Best Song: This Is Music
Worst Song: [Reprise]

I have mixed feelings about the Verve. Their heaviness and bombastic feel, the downtempo extravagance and over-engineered wall of guitar sound is both exhilarating and frustrating.

Exhilarating because of the sheer grandeur of the sound. That huge bass, the snare crack, guitar pyrotechnics without a respite. Unbelievably tight playing and production to match. Perfectly executed. But it's frustrating because I really don't care much about what they have to say. And if I did find even a slight bit of meaning, it's lost in a strange narcissistic haze. Style before substance, once again.

It's all a bit much, though. The interminably long ballads made me feel like a trapped animal trying to get away. The heavier, bigger songs sound phoned in, as perfectly executed as they are. I would rather listen to pretty much any other post-grunge stalwarts - Pearl Jam, Collective Soul, Bush even.

They sure do sound like Rock Stars™ though.

Actually nowhere near as bad as I was expecting, and quite enjoyable for considerable periods, although equally it did become a bit too much in patches. I was unconvinced with the vocals at first - throughout the album I was flip flopping between "Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up mate" and "actually this guy can carry a melody fairly well", but he fits within the spacey, diffuse, drowned in reverb template that The Verve exercise here. The running time is a bit unnecessary for me - 45-50 minutes max would have done just fine, but I made it all the way through which has to count for something. There was enough on offer here to warrant a revisit down the line, though I'm perhaps not in any great hurry for it.

Relentlessly bland.

dosadno, pičkasto i, što je najbitnije, predugo, repetitivno. stvarno je naporno slušat krindž stihove i po sto puta. da su pjesme duplo kraće bile bi znatno bolje. uz sve to omot je urnebesno krindž, koji je problem ovom liku šta se mršti, baš mi dođe da ga išamaram ko majmuna

I wasn't very moved by it, it just was one long series of mouth noises.

This is veeery boring. Even for radio this is boring. Why does it need to belong here? What is groundbreaking about this that it needs to be in the list?

Started off thinking, this is fine but not sure why I had to listen to it. By the time I got to the end, I started to dislike it.

There's moments during "This Is Music", "On Your Own", and "Drive You Home" where Richard Ashcroft just can't hit or sustain the notes he's looking for, and it's just sad... Sad he'd even attempt it. He seemingly thinks he's a big time singer/frontman with chops and swagger when really he's a warlber of bad teenage poetry (at best) to mediocroe music.

Now, again, I'm of the age where I could appreciate The Verve when they broke out but now I'm merely thinking I had their albums at the time just to have them, because I increasingly don't even like them, I don't even remember if I listened to this one really outwith a couple of songs... They're all so fucking long, like does this album require 3 songs that are over 6 minutes long? Fuck. No. Length does not equal epicness and volume does not ensure quality.

2.5/5.0: Mixed

theres a few good songs on here but overall its a pretty boring album.

Taking the mdma rock of Madchester out of the Hacienda and into a dingy dive bar, keeping some of the groove, but mostly slowing everything down and adding layers of swirling shoegaze guitars covered in wah wah and reverb, this album is full of big sounds and spacious songs that spiral and sprawl out. It does that trippy pyschadelic thing of using drone notes and warm overdriven repetition of melodic loops to draw you in hypnotically, allowing the rest of the sound to work on the rest of your mind and body - the high-register loping basslines create a loose floaty feel, the gutiar leads introduce little phrases that repeat and interate and transform into fuzzy feedback and fade away. Blissed out music and depressing lyrics, the classic combo!

More Oasis rock. I do like The Verve but don't miss that era.

The guitars are so fuzzy they just become static at certain points and his voice can peel paint. If I want a mid tier 90s brit band I'd just listen to pulp. No thanks

I'm just amazed that one of these guys managed to look like all 4 Beatles at the same time

Who outside the UK even knew these guys had more than one record. Though I think I like this one slightly better than the other. Second rate Oasis in any case.

Very 90s post-grunge Brit-rock. You know how every decade has its huge, tentpole, genre-defining bands? And then there are dozens of bands that sort of dance around that band, sounding vaguely the same as the other coalescing bands trying to recreate the magic of the tentpole band? This is one of the secondary bands. Not awful, but sort of cookie-cutter, and very much of its time.

Since I very much like the 90s sound, I didn't mind it. I enjoyed some songs and some were kind of annoying, and all were pretty forgettable.

I liked this better than Urban Hymns, but it's still pretty boring.
I felt like the last part was the best, because it turned more noisy, shoegazey, which I liked. But I don't know if it was just me reaching for anything likable on this album.

The problem with the CD era is that some bands feel that they need to fill as much of the available space as they can. The Verve have done this by dragging perfectly decent songs to well past their ‘bored-by’ date.

There's a lot dreamy guitar on this album. Except it’s so dreamy that the best time/place to listen is on earbuds at bedtime if you suffer from insomnia. And that’s not a bad thing. I think I could really like this album if I managed to listen another 4 or 5 times. But I can’t be arsed.

You know what the 1001 needs? More Britpop! No, not really. I liked Urban Hymns a lot more than I expected, but this one didn't measure up (and I don't see why we needed two albums by The Verve). My main issue with this album was how lousy the guitars sounded - there's an undertone of feedback/noise in almost every song. I read that they were looking for a "raw" sound on this album but it just ends up sounding crappy. It's a shame, because the bones of the songs are good, even if a lot of the music is pretty generic 90s heavy whiny Britpop (with a lot of ballads apparently). This album just didn't do it for me and was getting more on my nerves the more I listened. Oh, well. Ok-ish tracks: This is Music, History. Liked parts of Life's an Ocean and Stormy Clouds (liked the riff on the chorus), but both tracks dragged on and the end of Stormy Clouds had more of the noises I can't stand. The final "(reprise)" track is a perfect example of what I mean in terms of noise/feedback. So done with this album. One other note - the Wikipedia entry for this album is absurdly long. I've committed to listening to every album on the 1001 at least twice. Glad I didn't commit to reading every Wiki article...