(Originally published in Eye Weekly in 2008)
There’s something to be said about a band when everything clicks together, they flex together as a muscle and they become more than the sum of its parts. Thursday’s concert at the Ricoh was one of those occasions. Walking onstage wearing the colours of our local football club and in front of an audience warmed up by more than an hour of a DJ spinning funky northern soul and dub, the Verve wasted no time before getting right down to business.
The rhythm section was not only impeccable as timekeepers but loud as hell. Pete Salisbury gave us more than an hour of a solid hybrid between Bohham style thunder and the now classic Stone Roses or Happy Mondays swaggering shuffle. Partner in low-end-frequency-generating Simon Jones was clearly the one having the most fun, egging the audience on constantly, getting them to provide backing vocals at times and even at one point, in the middle of some jamming, sneaking in the bass line to Chic’s Good Times.
A lot has been said about Richard Ashcroft the shaman. The thing is, the spell cast only works when backed by the right people. Solo he can easily slip into schmaltz but with his Verve compadres, his performance takes on almost preacher like qualities. At one point he brilliantly segued from vocal jamming on the Stone Roses, along with Jones, into what he called his “own Resurrection”: C’Mon, one of the more muscular songs in their repertoire.
And then there’s Mr. Nick McCabe. Simon Jones said it himself in a recent interview with Eye Weekly: no, Nick; no Verve. The man unleashes wave after wave of echoes, seagulls, squeals, thunderclap, feedback and rumble that remind you why this band is a shoegaze heavyweight and not just Ashcroft’s vehicle for Britpop power ballad churning. Barring a couple of exceptions, the orchestra swells that some tracks have in studio were replaced more than competently by McCabe with his guitar and made some of this decade and a half old tracks feel new.
The audience was even receptive to new material like the new Sit And Wonder that keeps getting honed and tweaked and is now, I assume, as close to being a finished track as it will get. The same reception, warm by Toronto’s vaguely-swaying-to-the-rhythm standards, was given to non-greatest-hits tracks like Life’s An Ocean. Yes, the emphasis was on Urban Hymns material, as would be expected, but A Storm In Heaven and A Northern Soul were also revisited.
By the time Bittersweet Symphony was played as an encore, the audience had rocked out to the best of the band’s catalog. You could feel another wave had crested and the band was bringing us down softly and was saying goodbye with a funky number in the vein of vintage Charlatans. For a gig that some would describe as just another nostalgic reunion, we got a treat of a gig and now our hopes are raised for that forthcoming fourth album. Even if it took them a decade.
There’s something to be said about a band when everything clicks together, they flex together as a muscle and they become more than the sum of its parts. Thursday’s concert at the Ricoh was one of those occasions. Walking onstage wearing the colours of our local football club and in front of an audience warmed up by more than an hour of a DJ spinning funky northern soul and dub, the Verve wasted no time before getting right down to business.
The rhythm section was not only impeccable as timekeepers but loud as hell. Pete Salisbury gave us more than an hour of a solid hybrid between Bohham style thunder and the now classic Stone Roses or Happy Mondays swaggering shuffle. Partner in low-end-frequency-generating Simon Jones was clearly the one having the most fun, egging the audience on constantly, getting them to provide backing vocals at times and even at one point, in the middle of some jamming, sneaking in the bass line to Chic’s Good Times.
A lot has been said about Richard Ashcroft the shaman. The thing is, the spell cast only works when backed by the right people. Solo he can easily slip into schmaltz but with his Verve compadres, his performance takes on almost preacher like qualities. At one point he brilliantly segued from vocal jamming on the Stone Roses, along with Jones, into what he called his “own Resurrection”: C’Mon, one of the more muscular songs in their repertoire.
And then there’s Mr. Nick McCabe. Simon Jones said it himself in a recent interview with Eye Weekly: no, Nick; no Verve. The man unleashes wave after wave of echoes, seagulls, squeals, thunderclap, feedback and rumble that remind you why this band is a shoegaze heavyweight and not just Ashcroft’s vehicle for Britpop power ballad churning. Barring a couple of exceptions, the orchestra swells that some tracks have in studio were replaced more than competently by McCabe with his guitar and made some of this decade and a half old tracks feel new.
The audience was even receptive to new material like the new Sit And Wonder that keeps getting honed and tweaked and is now, I assume, as close to being a finished track as it will get. The same reception, warm by Toronto’s vaguely-swaying-to-the-rhythm standards, was given to non-greatest-hits tracks like Life’s An Ocean. Yes, the emphasis was on Urban Hymns material, as would be expected, but A Storm In Heaven and A Northern Soul were also revisited.
By the time Bittersweet Symphony was played as an encore, the audience had rocked out to the best of the band’s catalog. You could feel another wave had crested and the band was bringing us down softly and was saying goodbye with a funky number in the vein of vintage Charlatans. For a gig that some would describe as just another nostalgic reunion, we got a treat of a gig and now our hopes are raised for that forthcoming fourth album. Even if it took them a decade.
