About ten years after disbanding, The Verve recently released their fourth album entitled “Forth.” For any fans in admiration of the band’s nineties psychedelic rock grooves, this album should not disappoint. The Verve succeeds in returning to their sound in this fully loaded reunion album.

With three out of ten songs exceeding seven minutes, the album devotes itself to trippy synthesized string and vocal effects underlying dance tunes to ballads. There’s a strong start in “Sit and Wonder” which begins with a slow crescendo of spacey distorted loops before crashing into a driving beat. Richard Ashcroft delivers catchy lyrics throughout, with vocal styling reminiscent of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. The energy is maintained through “Love is Noise”, an easy dance beat sing-a-long, and “Rather Be”.

Then the album slows down with a series of long relaxed jams that would seem right at home on a David Gilmour album. “Judas” finally picks up a few minutes in after a lot of glass harmonica sustained synth to an R&B vocal and percussive performance. Squealing guitar allows the piece to transcend along with various smooth vocal over-dubs. The electric guitar intro to “Numbness” sounds pretty close to that of Pink Floyd’s “Breathe”, but then becomes somewhat of a blatant steal when the first vocals read “just breathe in the air, don’t be afraid…”

“Noise Epic” is the longest song on the album at 8:14 and contains colorful segments of almost grunge rock jams with Ashcroft’s vocals being barely audible within verses and sounding filtered through a loudspeaker. This is in turn followed by the shortest song on the album “Valium Skies” which is the closest that The Verve comes to another “Bittersweet Symphony”. An easy album favorite, it delivers a relaxed beat under suspenseful verses opening up into call-and-response oh’s and ah’s before rising into its orchestra assisted refrain.

“Forth” finds an appropriate closing song in “Appalachian Springs”, the honest attempt at a modern rock ballad with long segments of guitar soloing and the most versatile vocal display on the album. On the whole, these British rockers don’t rest on their laurels and this album stirs up a soothing reminder of The Verve that everyone knows and loves.

***Media credit: myspace.com/theverve