Forth begins with and sustains an emotional and instrumental mass, replete with all the old space-rock leanings and bombastic guitar doodlings that the Verve mastered so well as a 90’s Brit-rock powerhouse. The album lifts off with “Sit and Wonder,” a slab of balladry built upon whispy ambiance and slip-sliding guitar tremors. The orchestration of diverse instrumentation and playful experimentation lock together like the gristle-slick gears of some unimaginable, steam-driven aircraft, a spruce goose with its innards exposed and clanking as it clambers upward into the cloud cover. The songs slow-moving heft mirrors Richard Ashcroft’s narrative about a flabbergasted guy trying in vain to understand the flighty, enchanting object of his desire, repeated lyrics chugging along at a snails pace until the breakaway chorus of, “Give me some light.”
“Love is Noise” with its chirping vocal samples and propellant high-hat thrust plays like a lost New Order single as Ashcroft waxes lovelorn in full-on stoic poet mode, “Love is noise, love is pain / Love is these blues that I’m singing again.”
“Rather Be” and “Numbness” feel like they could have been written back in the band’s Urban Hymns days, with lovely, entrenched reverb guitars and druggy/sleepy vocals. “Columbo” makes great use out of a scaled-back foundation of sustained keys and forward-march drum kit antics, before mellowing into a slice of hypnotic post-punk pop. “Valium Skies” and “Judas” mark album high points as Ashcroft and company expand upon the familiar territory of spacy love songs. Ashcroft’s delivery on “Valium Skies” presents his vocals as instrumentation, repeating and layering over itself like another orchestral flourish. “Judas” delivers the band into the new millennium’s mash-up musicality (wilted vocals, reverse guitars fluttering like oil slick streams) and allows Ashcroft meditation time on a simple moment when a beautiful girl gives his self-loathing narrator a drink: “New York, I was Judas / She said, ‘A latte, double shot for Judas.”
Favorite Track: “Judasi”
