Time to get this 'all the records by forty' project back on the rails. Time is running out. But - and remember this, crucially - there is still plenty of time.
I've had The Verve's Urban Hymns queued up for months. I have had a block on progressing because I did not want to play it. It's all Chris Martin's fault. I can't even remember who Chris Martin is, but he's married to somebody who's less famous than the tabloids would wish us to think.
Then my former next door neighbour "Howls Like A Wolf" compounded it by playing Urban Hymns, loudly, a couple of days later. The best I could say about it was that it was significantly better than the woeful efforts of Howls Like A Wolf - hey, even Mrs HLAW considers his singing woeful. But they've moved out now. Live8's an age ago. I expect many of the performers can no longer remember what it was about.
I bought this record back in 1997 when it was fresh and cool, and I was damn cool back then. Well, I'll let you believe that, most of you didn't know me then! It certainly sounded like a breath of fresh air then, but listening to it now and I'm not sure what to think.
I had a discussion with my brother the other day. I don't want Christmas present but instead I want double birthday so I can buy an MP3 player. He asked me whether I was intending to put my entire CD collection onto it. I said, in principle, but I'll soon find plenty of tracks and possible even entire albums that I might discretely erase. He said he refused to countenance the possibility that he might ever have made any mistakes in his record buying life. I countered that even on other wise great albums there are turkeys - I cited Christy Moore's appallingly twee cover of the Fairytale of New York. I didn't go on to say that there are albums that actually only contain a small handful of tracks worth wasting three minutes of your life on.
If I was listening now on an MP3 I would most certainly delete Catching the Butterfly. Maybe I'm getting old but this is just noise. Similarly Weeping Willow.
Perhaps I wasn't cool as I thought I was back there. Perhaps I only bought it for Bittersweet Symphony, that staple of Pub jukeboxes, certainly round here, and, quite possibly, across the nation. And just looking at the CD liner, it's just dawned on me that, unlike the rest of the album, which is written either by Ashcroft or The Verve, this track is written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Okay, perhaps I'm the only person who doesn't know that, I've never been able to get into The Rolling Stones. But, I'm thinking, even though I don't especially like Sir Mick, I would far rather hear him sing it. Indeed, I would far rather hear just about anybody - Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Dido, Andrea Bocelli - sing it rather than this grating annoying toss-pot. Maybe he's not a toss-pot, maybe I'm just finding him guilty by association with that nobody whose name I've already forgotten and can't be bothered to look earlier in the post.
I also like The Drugs Don't Work. Although probably not as much as I liked it back there. It's one of those songs that's desperate to be a standard, used at least once, in my experience as music-over music in some schmaltzty TV documentary or drama. But that bloke's voice is intensely irritating.
One Day has the potential of being a reasonably good song, if only it were sung by someone better, like, oh I don't know How ls Like A Wolf.
But the overall effect is one of banal sentimentality masquerading as emotional depth. I'm glad I've got that out of the way for another ten years or something. I can't see this being a priority to load onto my MP3 player. I decided to rate it on Amazon with two stars and thus I got recommended Katie Melua and McFly. Not that I pay the slightest attention to the Amazon star ratings, because people who love aproduct give it five stars and thosse that are indifferent or hate it don't bother registering that.
The packaging is rather dire. Five sheets of paper stapled into a twenty page booklet full of mainly abstract photos, a couple of them quite good. No lyrics, no information, just pretentious crap. I expect Verve's name will live on because of two songs. Otherwise, bleugh...
