The Verve Gushes Forth

These days, most of the Gen Xers who listened to “Bittersweet Symphony” in their dorm rooms, dreams of scuffling with the Gallagher brothers and/or making out with PJ Harvey swirling through their head like so many bong hits, are now tattoo-sleeved dads and bottle-blonde moms pushing Bugaboo strollers along the avenues of Park Slope. So it's high time for a bit of nostalgia for the glory days of post-Nirvana indie rock: the "New British Invasion" of the mid/late-90s (spearheaded on mainstream radio by Blue and trotted after by the Verve, Oasis and Radiohead). The Verve's first new record since 1997, Forth (out this week on the band’s imprint, On Our Own), is here to provide the soundtrack for your trip down memory lane.

The Verve’s new offering fall into the “same-but-different” category. The first half of Forth features a riff of swelling, swirling songs that border on the tedious (only one is under five minutes) paired with Richard Ashcroft's plaintive aphorisms ("Love is noise/ Love is pain" from the single “Love Is Noise”) that we recognize from the band’s touchstone record Urban Hymns. But starting with the sparser, daresay funkier fifth song, “Numbness,” the album takes a bit of a heroic turn into poppier waters. When a quartet of piano notes backed by a faint string section starts the next track (“I See Houses”), one prepares to hear Madonna’s “Live To Tell”—until Ashcroft drones another one of his reverb-laced neo-philosophic choruses: “I get this feeling/ That I/ I’ve been here before,” over a wash of dirty guitar chords. Hey Richie, so do we.

Apparently, the Verve got the memo: add some 1980s synth blips and bleeps to a ’90s cloud of Jag-Stang jangle and voila, you've got new millennium music. So although familiar-sounding, Forth is just fresh enough to slip into today's indie-rock landscape—as if Wolf Parade or Interpol recorded an album after attending a week-long yoga retreat led by Gnarls Barkley. So strap your baby to your chest, grab a smoothie and think of the glorious days of Lollapalooza mud pits and Monica Lewinsky’s navy blue Gap dress. Forth should carry you over until Oasis’s new record Dig Out Your Soul drops on Oct. 7.