The Verve - Urban Hymns

7.0 - England - 1997

All things considered, a pretty decent Matchbox 20 record.  Whereas Verve (pre definitive article) made a few great space rock albums, this record suffers from singer Richard Ashcroft's perhaps unfounded conviction that he is a great singer-songwriter type.  The results, unfortunately, are mixed. The police had better arrest this man -- he's buzzing like a fridge.

By far, the best tracks are the group-written efforts: "Catching The Butterfly", "Come On", and "The Rolling People" (though the latter was better when it was called "The Four Horsemen" by Aphrodite's Child).  Aside from these fairly good jammy tracks, the rest of the record suffers from being boring chick-rock songs. Of these tracks, "The Drugs Don't Work" is, funnily enough, the only one that really works.  "Space and Time" and "Weeping Willow" are also barely passable, but the rest will have to be held back.  "Lucky Man" is thoroughly pedestrian, and "This Time" and "One Day" are dire indeed. 

That said, "Bittersweet Symphony" is a good one-hit wonder (not the least due to its convoluted copyright backstory) - ostensibly it was written by the whole group, but as the result of an arbitrary legal fiction, it's credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.