By:
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Players:
Simon Jones - Bass, Vocals
Richard Ashcroft - Bass, Guitar, Percussion, Vocals
Simon Clarke - Flute, Horn Arrangements
Kick Horns - Horn
Yvette Lacey - Flute
Roddy Lorimer - Horn Arrangements
Nick McCabe - Guitar, Piano, Accordion, Keyboards
Peter Salisbury - Percussion, Drums
A Storm In Heaven
Verve
Vernon Yard, 1993
Reviewed by Paul Foreman
You are living on the edge. You are taking loads of drugs. You are emaciated and have no job. This perhaps is a scary feeling, but at least you're in a band and you know that sooner or later you are going to have it fucking large. You are Richard Ashcroft and you should be more than a little uncomfortable, because the next five years of your life are going to be a rollercoaster ride from hell looping back and forth between emotional turmoil and phenomenal success.
But let's focus on the here and now. It's 1993 and you've put out some good shit so far. "All In The Mind" is a pretty impressive debut single. Nick McCabe, guitarist extraordinaire, is on your side, already trailblazing a path to sonic righteousness. The rhythm section is solid to say the least. You've got The Verve EP's lengthy, if not too self-indulgent, trip-out jams to prove that. "Gravity Grave," man!
The album's going to have more direction though. Your vision includes more acoustic guitar without folking-out. It's got to have horns, but they have to adapt to Verve's style: layer them and drench them in reverb. Nick's Roland Space Echo analog tape delay unit should be coupled with a bit more distortion. Your lyrics are getting weirder every moment, but the songs are shorter, more structured and more to the point. Right. Let's go. Come On!
Verve's debut album is truly a landmark. Beginning where the shoegazers left off and reaching levels they couldn't quite make it to, A Storm In Heaven is a colossal slab of psychedelia-tinged soul rock.
"Hello, it's me, it's me calling out / I can't see you. Hello, it's me crying out, crying out / are you there?" begs Ashcroft over McCabe's heavily effected guitar nuances in "Star Sail." It's not until "Slide Away," though, that the band's newly-refined songwriting abilities really begin to shine. It feature's Verve's first truly great chorus - a moment of gorgeous, swirling ear candy: "I was thinking maybe we could go outside / Let the night sky cool your foolish pride / Don't you feel alive? / These are your times and our highs. "
"Already There" and "Beautiful Mind" follow and are soundscapes to hang-glide to. By this time there is really no doubt about it: This is pure drug music. Yet it is so terribly affecting. There is so much feeling there, feeling that you never really got from any other record before this. Perhaps it's the way that A Storm In Heaven blends chaos with beauty, desperation with serenity.
The first half of the record closes with a mad mix of saxes on "The Sun, The Sea," which, six years later, still hasn't been pulled off as well as it is here. Again, the chorus finds the band climbing to a mountaintop, roaring in stereo through a Marshall stack and a Fender Twin.
The true climax of the record can pinned down, though not easily, within the immaculate single "Blue." The track glides along on backward cymbal swells and Ashcroft's infectious vocal which slips flawlessly in and out of falsetto: "Conceived in a chrome dream, I was a crease in the shirt that this world wears." McCabe's fluid guitar-playing clearly peaks on the bridge "Blue," as he blends feedback and heavy power chord riffs into a spellbinding musical jigsaw puzzle.
You're lost in a strange, strange place and time and after another horn-infected rocker ("Butterfly") the band let you down gently with "See You In The Next One (Have A Good Time)." It's sadly ironic that five years and two more albums later Ashcroft will find himself singing this very song live without Nick McCabe by his side during The Verve's final U.S. tour - "I like the way it was, hate the way it is now."
Second Review
Unless you spent the entire summer of 1997 in a coma, you've heard the song "Bittersweet Symphony." Found everywhere from the top of the charts to Nike ads, under the leadership of Richard Ashcroft, The Verve crafted an album's worth of beautiful ballads 'Urban Hymns' that featured intelligent lyrics, soulful singing and exquisitely crafted pop melodies. Alas, the Verve broke up after the album, and we'll have to hope that Richard Ashcroft's solo career provides us with more of those type of songs.A listener unfamiliar with the Verve might wonder why they broke up then, at the height of their fame and fortune. As is so often the case, Ashcroft, the band's singer, didn't get along too well with Nick McCabe, the Verve's psychedelic-genius guitarist. If Urban Hymns was Ashcroft's album, giving voice to his increasing desire for ballads and other traditional song structures, then A Storm in Heaven is McCabe's album, a masterwork of psychedelic guitar virtuosity. In the space of five minutes, he erects and dismantles shimmering walls of sound, his tools a six string, delays, effect pedals, and a stack of amps. On almost every song, Ashcroft's vocals are buried deeper in the mix, haltingly articulating the emotions called forth by McCabe.
Opening with the track "Star Sail," the Verve issues a challenge to the listener, the juxtaposition of thick, somewhat discordant chords, and the almost lilting melody that emerges from it. How can such starkly opposed sounds open a song? Slowly but surely, McCabe builds up an iimpressive edifice: a twin melody emerges, McCabe's playing and the heavily delayed echo, before thickly distorted guitar picks up, bending the song in new directions, at each and every turn building over Ashcroft's haunting vocals. The entire album works much the same way, suggestive, but vague, lyrics; ever-climbing squalls of guitar noise; repeated crescendos rising and falling like the tide. Other highlights include "The Sun, The Sea," which definitely puts the 'rock' back into psychedelic rock and "Butterfly," which builds off a blues riff into a majestic, ascendant crescendo.
It's most certainly not 'poor' lyrics by Ashcroft that make this McCabe's album; they are as witty, wry and evocative as on any Verve album. The guitar work is simply that magnificent. More melodic than My Bloody Valentine; bluesier than the Stone Roses; the Verve, as a unit, rather than as Ashcroft's backups, are at the top of their form on their debut album.
--Tim Rollins