embrace.

I heaped praise on Embrace's debut spouting something like the album was a grand opus likely to endure, whereas "Bring It On" ... "but only in moderation"... and was ..."heritage-listed in 1973" and that... "the Lynyrd Skynyrd revial wasn't funny first time 'round!".

Funny how things turn out innit?!

Personally, they say more to me than Coldplay. Why is it that they received worldwide critical kudos, when others of their ilk, had seriously made better efforts?

I think if you collated the best tracks from Embrace's first two albums, you'd certainly hace a classic on your hands.

Danny's voice is best suited on the grandiose ballads, but, his voice can come across a little too stylistically weepy in places. They deserve mass stadium, symphony'led ballad-rock hegemony like The Verve and Verve before them.

Incidentally, wasn't their third LP a greatest hits album of sorts: put out hurriedly by their record company?

Just remember, Starsailor have a lot to answer too, also!

Aloft candles at the ready then....

I'm talking about the songs too, with regards the Missy/J-Lo thing; is it not just as judgemental to dismiss Missy & J-Lo as indistinguishable due to them both being women doing hip-hop/pop/r'n'b hybrids? (And isn't J-Lo's message just as juch "you love me" as Missy's, although without the Twinky bit?)

Soul and mystique are very nebulous concepts when talking about a band as well, as is blandness. There's a certain facet to the ILM mindset that cannot deal with popular guitar music except from a straight ahead rockist direction, that is unless it actually likes it in the first place, whereas it will twist all sorts of tropes and memes around until it can justify liking anything vaguelly derived from pop or hip hop, and I'm finding this automatic and knee-jerk inverse rockism quite irritating lately.

now i went out to buy the record and realised that i accidently bought the keane one because i couldn't tell the difference.

ps. yeah i have time for doves and not embrace. weird.
pps. '100,000 embrace fans can be wrong'

bye!

And I do see that Keane wouldn't exist without Embrace, of course, likewise Northern Uproar wouldn't exist without Oasis, etcetera etcetera ad infinitum. You really are quite dull mentally, aren't you Paul?

anyways. i buy os mutantes records! i'm not the 'right' person to dicuss embrace's fabulousness (?)... ha.

err. calm down. i feel like i'm in an over-emotional episode of THE OC with an over-wrought EMBRACE fan.

dude. i don't like embrace. errr ... sorry? (again?)

PS. RJG is just as snide but in a funnier way, and I like Jim a lot even though we've had spats.

i do have the 'all you good good people' single somewhere in a box in canada.

hope this helps!

i'm being bullied by an embrace fan.

they are still boring and proto-keane, though.

bye!

i just came by to apologise for England.

thanks steven.

that sums up my own feelings about doves rather nicely.

(put on the last broadcast during this 'debate' and am really enjoying it ...)

Nooooooooooo. The vinyl equivalent of a black hole, sucking the life out of every other record in it's orbit.

The thing about Embrace is they never had any real truck with the "new Oasis" comparisons, and in fact were really hamstrung by them. The intention, as told to me pretty explicitly the other week, was to be "My Bloody valentine with strings", i.e. a combination of raw noise and heartfelt sentiment. I don't think they actually sound much like Oasis at all and never did; I don't even like Oasis much beyond a few songs.

The things about Embrace that I love are pretty much threefold - firstly the songs, secondly the sense of community that the band encourage in their fans, the way they interract with them and feed off them (the secret gigs being a prime example), coupled with the media's rather bi-polar approach to the band it's created a very real sense of us-against-them which has fired the band, especially for this new album. And the third thing is their creativity - they've never stood still, always moved forwards, always had their sights set on the next record they're making, trying to develop their sound and not just by throwing in all the production glitches they can (which is what I felt Doves did too much on their last album), and they've never been recognised for doing that by anybody but their fanbase really. The second and third albums, and a lot of the b-sides from the beginning through to now, contain an awful lot of musical ideas that you wouldn't expect from a "four square indie band", ideas that bands like Oasis simply never had, and it's throughly irritating hearing them being criticised for being boring and dull and conservative when they're not. Also, they ROCK hard when they bother, and they are absolutely fucking great live - the atmosphere at their gigs is amazing when they take off, which is much more often than not in the dozen or so times I've seen them.

But of course this is all totally subjective, and to everyone else apart from the people who buy the records and go to the gigs and like the band, received wisdom and second hand cliché is all that matters.