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."
