Urban Hymns

:shrug:
Not for Me

Only knew Bittersweet Symphony before giving this a listen. Rest of the album is really good, might be a new favorite for me

The Good: It’s a Symphony!
The Bad: It’s bittersweet…
The Ugly: Having to wait 10 minutes to hear a baby cry…

I recall thinking, when the video of the only hit these lads ever had came out, that here’s a clone of Oasis, also thinking they are god’s gift to humanity…
I never listened to an entire album by The Verve, so this was a first…

and my thoughts are bland… as that is what the album was for me: bland. It didn’t make me sit up and pay attention, it didn’t want me to hit the skip button… except by the time the last track came into play.

So, I ask again, why is this an album that one needs to listen to before one dies? It contains 1 hit, and only thanks to the Rolling Stones, the rest of the album generates imagery of a pseudo nerd just sharing his thoughts… nothing rock n roll about this album at all.

2 1/2*

Much like my review of The Charlatans Tellin' Stories from a few weeks ago...

I'm of the age where I could appreciate The Verve when they broke out, they're a tidy band, neither too flashy nor underperforming and were more infamous with their never ending in-fighting and breaking up every other week and Richard Ashcroft properly hating Nick McCabe, but there's no world where this album is in a list of albums you must listen too. You could give me the entire paper content of an office supply store and I still wouldn't get to this album on that list. There's enjoyable stuff on here but it's only cracking the "best of 1997" top 10 lists of old british music rag journalists who wanked themselves blind over any band that knew three chords and could pull an unlikely hit out their arse (looking at you NME & Q).

I mean, 1997 gave us great albums from Radiohead, Blur, Ben Folds Five, Notorious BIG, Foo Fighters, The Prodigy, Missy Elliott, Elliott Smith, Marcy Playground, Sneaker Pimps (those last three being released on the same day), Oasis, and Portishead, then even lower level UK guitar music scene stuff like aforementioned The Charlatans, Stereophonics, Cornershop, Robbie Williams, Ocean Colour Scene. And these were all released either before or the same day as this.

"Bittersweet Symphony" is the stand out but it's long since been played out, and the whole album is overly long and wrought with the notion that length somehow equals epicness and endless lovelorn ballads is what the people wanted. Yeah, there's love if you want it, but it literally didn't need no sonnet.

Es ist ein Meisterwerk britischer Rockmusik. Mit Songs wie *Bitter Sweet Symphony* und *The Drugs Don't Work* verbindet das Album emotionale Tiefe mit epischer Soundlandschaft und zeitloser Melancholie. Die atmosphärische Produktion, kombiniert mit kraftvollem Gesang, macht jeden Track zu einem Erlebnis. Von gefühlvollen Balladen bis hin zu hymnischen Gitarrenriffs – Das Album fängt die Essenz der späten 90er perfekt ein und bleibt auch heute noch faszinierend. Ein Album, das Generationen überdauert. 😊👍

'And I'm a million different people from one day to the next.' Ashcroft has a bit too much of the Bono affect, - melodramatic, laying into something that doesn't exist - the songs are too long, and the music is often prosaic. 'The Rolling People' boringly channels Oasis. Listen: 'And here we ARE the rolling people' directly lifts Liam Gallagher's characteristic cadence. 'The Drugs Don't Work' is properly earnest but poorly written: 'The drugs don't work they just make you worse.' Obvious much? The best song here is the short 'Neon Wilderness,' but even that can't save the record from being a dispiriting drag. Dreariness is a necessary theme of our best art, but it's not a productive quality. 'We have existence and it's all we share.' Yecch.

Bittersweet symphony can't make up for the fact that this album is 75mins of soulless, pandering softrock muzak. A proper waste of time. 1/5

Bittersweet Symphony is of course a bop and the other singles stand out, especially The Drugs Don't Work but the longer songs overstay their welcome - The Rolling People is great for a 3 minutes but lasts 7, Catching the Butterfly feels indulgently long. Not bad shoegaze but the deeper cuts are not interesting enough to warrant their run time. Fun listen but not memorable enough as a whole to be a 4 out of 5.

British classic. Moody, questioning, psychedelic (less so than their previous two albums) and melodic.
Massive singles surrounded by a set of songs with a cohesive mood and feel. Brilliant.

I like the density of melody but I'm not crazy about the lyricism and vocal style. The mix is very nice and pleasingly rich.

Wow, more bland britpop who would’be guessed? 2.38

and legend has it that he is still walking down that road...

Just here to recommend these guys first album 'A Storm in Heaven'. An absolute belter of a shoegaze record.

Working with Oasis' people was a mistake. Shame the Stones' people fucked them also.

This album is fine. Definitely listen to that debut also/instead.

Well this was shite. Super disappointing!!

Bitter Sweet Symphony - classic tune +1 star. Sonnet - another good song, most recently known as that song from an overplayed advert

And that's the only positives I have for this sadly. It was so boring and bland. Sounded like a less successful Oasis

2 ⭐️

Music to turn any occasion into a dull affair.

All the singles are so good but I already knew that, what surprised me was the quality of some of the other tracks.

I do like their vibe so it’s not hard to listen to this album. But there’s certainly isn’t much variety to it. 3.5 if I could. Bittersweet Symphony really is a great tune but nothing else on this album is half as good.

Bland. Average 90's Britpop. Inoffensive background music, really.

I’m at a 3.5, and I wish I could leave it there, but I think I’m going to barely bump this up to a 4, even with some hesitations in doing so.

I mean, I’ve been sitting here for about 68 minutes of total music, and I just sort of feel… strange. This is not a bad album at all; it’s incredibly technically sound, and in terms of the actual soundscape, production, melodies, and appeal, what’s here is a marked improvement over the sort of dreadfully bland “A Northern Soul” from 290 albums ago. As a whole, I really did enjoy most of the tracks here. Bitter Sweet Symphony is still pretty damn good, and most of the other 12 tracks are enjoyable.

However, this album falls into the same trap and pit that “A Northern Soul” did – it takes a while for it to fall into that pit, but it gets there. I wasn’t able to put this into words 290 albums ago, but I’ve figured out what it is now: this album treats every single track like it’s the closing track of the album, and it creates a homogenous sort of effect where all the luster of the orchestral arrangements, and the big epic swirling soundscapes sort of become… mundane. It doesn’t ruin the album experience as much as it did on “A Northern Soul”, mainly because they managed to figure out how to make most of the tracks compelling while sustaining me as a listener for the most part… but it does really start to creep in the longer the album goes on. This could easily be avoided if they just threw in some “lesser” tracks, but… I dunno, hearing what ELO did on “Out of The Blue”, which does a pretty similar thing with giving every track a level of bombastic importance, but to a much more successful degree, makes this album feel like it sort of failed in comparison.

Don’t get me wrong, what’s here still sounds great across the board, and I’m sure most of, if not all of these tracks will likely feel better individually, separated from the 68 minutes that turn the album experience into a bit of a slog. The strength of that individuality is, oddly enough, what’s giving me the leeway to bump this up from a 3.5 to a 4, if only because I feel like this deserves higher than a 3. I vibed so much more with the tone and soundscapes and the general energy of this album compared to “A Northern Soul”, and I fully acknowledge that most of these tracks, if they pop up on shuffle, are gonna feel fucking great to listen to. As an entire album experience, front to back, it starts strong, and then really settles into a flatline around the middle, with occasional little peaks back upward, but… man, when it settles, it settles in a weird way that doesn’t feel as engaging as it could have or should have. This is full of individually good to great tracks that simply don’t mesh super well as an album – when you’re deep in the trenches, it just feels too similar to really feel good as an album. They just sound so damn good though. I feel OK with bumping this up to a 4 – I could easily regret it in the future, but it feels correct right now.

Avausraita on suorastaan meemi tässä kohtaa. Muuten musta hieman huonosti vanhentunut alt-rock-levy. 2/5