VERVE

How do you kill a band?  The ONE HIT WONDER tag.

Verve (I refuse to add “The”) kicked righteous ass those first few years of their existence.  The singles were amazing (and the mini-album that gathered up a few of them), the live stuff from that era that I’ve heard is sufficiently mind-blowing and the debut album, A STORM IN HEAVEN, was an awesome capstone.  Fucking incredible music.  Hell, even the NO COME DOWN cash-in-on-Lollapalooza compilation, as half-assed and lazy as it was, was pretty spiffy. 

The second proper album was a little more conventional (i.e. generic), but not a total embarrassment.

And then came URBAN HYMNS.  I don’t listen to it a lot, cuz it goes on for TOO DAMN LONG, but it’s really a pretty fine album.  In places.  “Bittersweet Symphony”, unfortunately, was the kiss of death.   It was too good to follow up, and all attempts to do so tanked (at least here in America, the center of the known musical universe where all true success is measured). It doomed the band to never getting a decent comprehensive re-issue/remastering campaign.  Just a one disc “The Singles” compilation.  Blah.

So, again, obtain the early music in whatever way you can.  These guys were sort of somewhat lumped in with the shoegazers whenever it was convenient for the press, but they really seemed to have a whole other aesthetic.  More psychedelic/trippy, plus the artwork by Microdot was always uniformly excellent.