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There are a few flashes here of something good and interesting, without being consistently engaging or challenging.
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There are a few flashes here of something good and interesting, without being consistently engaging or challenging.
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Writing reviews of really good albums is a joy. It’s a piece of piss. Your enthusiasm and imagination are ignited, and optimism’s flames burn rampant and uncontrolled through every word, syllable and comma. Metaphors flower and flourish while similes flow like runny shite through a fat funnel.
The same goes for bad albums, the worse the better. Crap album? Load of old bollocks? Bring it on. A good slagging of a worthless slice of sour, mushy, pus is food for the soul and the relative anonymity of the written word, magnified a hundred fold by the faceless, groovy, all-singing, all-dancing, all-child molesting internet, just makes it easier. After all, what could be more fun than summarily dismissing a couple of years worth of mental and physical toil from a diligent and hopeful artist? Their confidence that their latest masterpiece will enhance not only their place in the musical world, but maybe even the world itself, can be derided and jeered at with impunity.
The worst thing about writing reviews is when you have to review an ‘alright’ album, an OK, fairly decent or reasonable album. What can you do with that? It’s a head-scratching, fag-smoking, tutting, typing and deleting, deadline-breaking chore. I, my friends and family and as you will probably already testify, the reader all have to suffer because someone made a record that just didn’t make it into either the brilliant or wank pile in my mental in-tray.
But what to do when faced with this conundrum? I could dredge through the internet and paraphrase any number of articles on any given band, but you can do that yourself and I’d soon be found out. I could immerse myself in the minutiae of the lyrical and musical content, comparing and contrasting it with the works of Beethoven, Byron and bloody Supertramp, but that’s not how I listen or react to music. Certainly not the music contained on a satisfactory album. I just can’t be arsed.
All I can do is just say what I think and I think Pushing The Senses by Feeder is a decent record. It hasn’t changed my life but I did listen to it while having my Sunday dinner the other day. Opener ‘Feeling A Moment’ and new single ‘Tumble and Fall’ are catchy enough, all drenched in reverb and guitars that have thankfully lost the metallic fizz-fuzz that was prevalent on a lot of their earlier work and acquired a more comfortable, shabby, twang.
The title track has a great, dumb, band-in-a-bedroom guitar hook and a vocal melody that has got ‘You’re young, buy me’ written all over it. Although it may not be breaking any moulds it’ll have the record company and the radio programmers salivating.
They’ve become a little less ‘Smashing Pumpkins Lite’ and become a little more ‘Coldplay Lite,’ which is a sentence that will no doubt upset a few fans, but as a ‘Rough Guide to Feeder’ it’s basically true. The slower, quieter numbers have yet to really grab my attention, apart from ‘Pain on Pain" which is shit and the louder, rougher parts don’t yet have me rattling the windows and jumping round the room like a tit.
Feeder are growing up, they’ve been through some shit. Their music is growing up with them and that’s an awkward process, fraught with danger. There are a few flashes here of something good and interesting, without being consistently engaging or challenging. Pushing The Senses may never get relegated to the ‘Never Play Again Ever’ shelf, but the hallowed MDF of the ‘Play Daily And Pay Attention’ pedestal is still a long way off.
It’s alright.
There, I’ve said it.
Words : MONO