"I want our music to come out of the speakers and for you to be able to warm your hands on it like it was a fire," declares Embrace singer/guitarist Danny McNamara. "I think it's much more important to show people how good they can feel rather than constantly going on about how bad you felt. I don't want to fucking depress people."

| It's an appropriately altruistic and gracious musical goal for a young British band whose first record, the hopefully titled The Good Will Out, was just released in America. Still, the band aren't Pollyanna when it comes to the record industry. They've been thrown wholesale into the music media machine, drawing comparisons to Britpop brethren like the Verve or Oasis, with whom Embrace share more than just similarities in sound. Both Embrace and the Verve employ the same management team; like Oasis, Embrace contains brothers -- Danny's younger sibling Richard plays guitar in the group, which is rounded out by bassist Steven Firth and drummer Mike Heaton.

"I think it's kind of shallow," the twenty-seven-year-old McNamara says of the analogies. "If we were women, I think we'd get compared to the Nolans [a group of English sisters]. I'm flattered by [comparisons to the Verve and Oasis], because I think they're both awesome bands, I just think they're both wrong. It's predictable and unexciting how people do that."

Opening with the sound of an orchestra tuning up, The Good Will Out boasts nearly an hour of uplifting, lilting, grand songs that, to the casual listener, do bear some similarities to the aforementioned Brit sensations. There are also traces of Lenny Kravitz-style psychedelic sex appeal and more obscure reference points such as Seventies AM radio and Mother Love Bone.

So far, reviews have been relatively positive. But while the U.S. press are treating Embrace like first-timers, the quartet has actually released four EPs in Great Britain on Virgin subsidiary Hut Recordings, and the Hut version of The Good Will Out debuted at the top of the U.K. charts in early July.

Clearly, America, with its more segmented radio and much larger population, may be a harder nut to crack than Embrace's home country. But that's not the band's goal. "I'm not a door-to-door salesman. If people like the music, we'll play, if they don't, I'll write the next one," McNamara shrugs.

And the singer/songwriter isn't exactly smitten with music biz terms like "conquer" or "break." "It sounds kind of colonial to me, and that died off in that country quite a long time ago," McNamara says with a chortle. "That thing of, 'I'm going to America and conquer it.' There's 250 million people there. I probably couldn't take two of them on!"

Still, American culture is McNamara's passion (the Beach Boys and Sly and the Family Stone are among his faves), even though he's only visited the States on a brief promotional trip and Embrace have yet to perform live here. (Scheduled dates include October 19 at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, October 27 at the Metro in Chicago and November 5 at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles).

"Everybody in England forgets we're on a first album -- they already think we're a big established band 'cause things have happened so quickly," McNamara says, "I hope that we have a chance to be unknown for longer in America."

KATHERINE TURMAN (September 8, 1998)