The Verve

Eleven years since the Verve's last album and Richard Ashcroft's manic-depressive disposition still reveals both brilliance and overindulgence. His stadium-sized wails linger in the doldrums as Valium-fueled distortion lifts songs like "Sit and Wonder" and "Columbo" into the otherworldly space of A Storm in Heaven, and hyper beats boost "Love Is Noise" into the grandiosity of Urban Hymns. The decade-long stagnancy hasn't changed their sound, but with tracks that jam past six minutes and dawdle in glossy production, the Brits often get too swept up in their own extravagance.

Two of the best psychedelic rock shows I've ever seen were by this British band, in
London and New York, in the summer of 1993, and most of the Verve's fourth record —
their first after a decade apart — is a return to that whirlpool-guitar, shaman-song form. "Sit
and Wonder" is what they meant by their 1993 album title A Storm in Heaven: the trancelike
gallop of bassist Simon Jones and drummer Peter Salisbury; guitarist Nick McCabe'... More >