The Verve: Urban Hymns : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Theft? Yeah, brilliant theft. Before the Verve sampled that bit of symphonic Stones in "Bitter Sweet Symphony," the riff -- cribbed from an old Muzak platter laughably credited to the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra (as if the Stones' old manager actually waved the baton) -- was just soft cheese. The Verve and their sunken-cheeked singer/lyricist Richard Ashcroft turned it into great theater, a swelling, swaggering pop treatise on heroic determination. "Urban Hymns," the British band's third LP, is an entire album on the subject, a defiantly psychedelic record -- soaked in slipstream guitars and breezy strings, cruising at narcotic-shuffle velocity -- about coping and crashing, about how "The Drugs Don't Work" (as Ashcroft puts it in the album's most ravishing song). What does work: Ashcroft yelling, "Fuck you! Come on!" in the last track over a big riff tide that leaves you stunned, cleansed and jones-ing for more.

Built to Spill make you work harder for epiphany. Where the Verve specialize in guitar hypnosis, singer/guitarist/songwriter Doug Mart.erh spins you 'round with slash-'n'-jangle guitar math and the kind of cryptoverse games that summon discomfiting memories of mid-'70s Yes albums. Yet Perfect From Now On, Built to Spill's major-label bow, is progressive rock in the most earnest sense of the term: a record of risk, invention and inspired forward motion, away from indie-rock cliche and out to What the Fuckville. Martsch walks a fine line between garage-opera spectacle (the spiralingguitar suite "Untrustable/Pt. 2 [About Someone Else]") and utter ham (the cosmological jive in "Randy Described Eternity"). But he does it with nerve and verve.