THE VERVE
Forth
(On Your Own/MRI/Megaforce/RED)
By Todd Lavoie
Deep down, I’d always suspected the Verve might come back. There was something so brashly epic, so cockily magisterial about their brawls-and-all band-breaker-upper Urban Hymns (Virgin), that when the Wigan, England, space-rock poppers self-detonated upon the album’s release in 1997, it was tough to fathom such a towering force receding from view, never to be seen or heard again.
Even now, more than a full decade later, Urban Hymns gives the same skin-prickling goodness in each and every one of my digits as it did on the day I brought it home from the record store – and I doubt I’m alone in that assertion, based on how deeply the recording seemed to resonate in the psyches of listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Hit albums and singles – as ubiquitous as they feel at the time of their success – come and go, often drifting out of the public consciousness only months after striking it big. Urban Hymns was much more than a mere hit. Rather, it was a proclamation of importance, a manifesto mighty enough for instant mythology.
Lest you’ve forgotten the sheer humbling grandiosity of this thing, go fetch your copy – and trust me, if you ever drew solace and hope from music back in the ’90s, you surely have one sitting in your stacks – and let the disc’s opening string-streaked fanfare of the zeitgeist-defining “Bitter Sweet Symphony” whisk you back to the exact moment you first stopped dead in your tracks and thought, “I can’t believe how good this is.”