Blur and Pulp both remained relevant for the fact that you can hear their influence in a young indie band every now and then far more than, say, you’d hear the influence of an American contemporary like Pearl Jam or Soundgarden. If you went to college in the last twenty years, you heard some guy playing “Wonderwall” in his dorm room enough that by the time you graduated you were ready to burn everything in sight made of wood as soon as that first chord echoed out. Our main pop interaction with the band was a handful of successful singles from 1997’s Urban Hymns, which was the band’s final album for a long time until they released Forth in 2008 (which was actually a good deal better than it had any business being, though it isn’t represented on this list). Very simply, though, the Verve were never firmly a part of the American conception of the Britpop narrative. Unfailingly, they sounded very serious, when even Britpop figures as self-inflated as the Gallagher brothers provided punchlines at rapid-fire speed.
They sounded like they had more to do with U2 and that they listened to American alternative well before Blur opened up to it.
Where the big three of Oasis, Blur, and Pulp, all grappled directly with topics and images of Britishness, the Verve were always looking pretty much exclusively inward. (Which I guess isn’t terrible? But still.) There’s the very simple fact that they are associated with Britpop while actually being quite a bit different tonally and thematically. Having only released four albums and having broken up three times, the Verve’s statistics are somewhat Spinal Tap-worthy, or at the very least make them Britpop’s answer to Jane’s Addiction. Ashcroft doesn’t possess the cartoonish hilarity of the Gallaghers, or the mellowed-out likeability of Damon Albarn, or the bookishly, charmingly avuncular vibe of Jarvis Cocker. You’ve got their singer, Richard Ashcroft, a perfectly arrogant British rock star who continues to play that role even as his solo output has devolved into a mixed bag of adult-contemporary singer-songwriter-isms (the similarities between Ashcroft and Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow character are too striking to be coincidental). I can think of, well, quite a few reasons for this. Quiet storm remained popular from the late '70s into the early '90s, when mainstream R&B took on a harder-edged hip-hop influence as a result, quiet storm found virtually no new practitioners.Few British bands from the 1990s, Britpop or otherwise, have been pushed to the sidelines more forcefully than the Verve. Some artists concentrated near-exclusively on the style, but most recorded more uptempo tracks in addition to the ballads that fit the requirements of the radio format. However, there was also an urbane sophistication and subdued soulfulness that marked quiet storm as unmistakably rooted in R&B. In a way, quiet storm was R&B's answer to soft rock and adult contemporary - while it was primarily intended for black audiences, quiet storm had the same understated dynamics, relaxed tempos and rhythms, and romantic sentiment. Quiet Storm also drew inspiration from Marvin Gaye's lush Let's Get It On LP, the orchestrations of Philly soul, and the gentle, ultra-smooth recordings of Al Green. The album eventually gave its name to a style and radio format that aimed to create very similar moods. In 1975, Smokey Robinson released a smooth, sensuous solo LP of romantic adult soul titled A Quiet Storm.
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