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Album Review: The Feeling – Join With Us

The Feeling’s first album, Twelve Stops and Home, came with certain social conditions attached – or I felt it did at least. Chief amongst these was that under no circumstances could you tell your male (gangster rap-loving) friends that you’d even listened to it, let alone owned it. The Feeling, in musical terms, were the definitive ‘guilty-pleasure’.But it was good, and it sold. The simplicity of the arrangements, the charming voice of Dan Gillespie-Sells, some intelligent (if quirky) lyrics, and all the while a quite prevalent, though not superficial, emotive backdrop. You felt the album did have ‘feeling’ to it.Not so with this new album. Simply, Join With Us is not that good. There are some of the trademark hooks, which will stick in your head for days. But in this album, they’re hidden between some points of daftness. Ditto with the touching messages. Take the title track – it has the most terrific pre-chorus. And then spoils it with a hideous chorus and the lyric ‘the world is in your hands’ set to a really mad, peculiar beat. It actually makes you feel ill. Loneliness has such a memorable refrain that my roommate (who, in the interests of his general popularity, shall remain nameless) starting singing along. But then somehow the actual verses are shockingly bad.
There is some good stuff – the best track is ‘Spare Me’. The reason – it’s simple. Piano, nice lyrics, the odd harmony; and none of the annoyance you get elsewhere. My conclusion – The Feeling were given lots of money to make their new album, and they spent too much on orchestras, and ‘big’ production. They’ve ended up with an album that is just far too ambitious. There are some great moments, some fragments of borderline genius, but it’s almost lost amongst the daftness – there was actually a baby’s voice at one point. Much of it, in truth, would not be out of place in the score for a pantomime. And that’s not The Feeling I remembered.Three stars.– By Nick Coxon

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