The Verve – This Is Music – The Singles 1992-1998 album review

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When Verve followed their impressive first three singles (most notably the magnificent “Gravity Grave”) with debut album A Storm In Heaven in 1993, it was wrongly attached by a straw-grasping press to the tail-end of the shoegazing movement populated by southern mimsies like Slowdive. The reality was darker, stranger and, yes, more northern than that might suggest, as the album – represented here by “Blue” and “Slide Away” (no, not that one) – stands up as a loopy excursion into acid-fuelled psychedelic blues. Verve were then forced to add a The, following legal problems with the synonymous US record label, and their songwriting reached maturity with their masterpiece, A Northern Soul. “History”, that album’s near-hit single, marked the band’s transition from drugged-up curiosities to a serious musical force. And, being the prototype for the more ubiquitous but inferior “The Drugs Don’t Work”, it’s also The Verve’s creative high watermark: like Massive Attack and Radiohead, they hit paydirt an album late. That Urban Hymns, half a decent album at best – even including “Bittersweet Symphony” – wound up being The Verve’s bestseller, is an injustice which this compilation’s timely memory-jog should do something to rectify – even if Virgin have cocked up the track listing by not running it chronologically.

Charlie Ivens