Taking Sides: CD review: The Verve emerge ‘Forth’ with new, uneven CD

Barry Courter: Most folks will know The Verve for the late ’90s “Bittersweet Symphony,” one of the better anthems in music. After the Rolling Stones successfully sued them for using the riff for the song without permission, the band kind of went into hiding, doing mostly solo works.

“Forth” is their fourth album and the first in 11 years. The 10 songs on the CD take the band back to their more experimental years, with lots of studio effects and lengthy tracks.

Casey Phillips: “Forth” was my first full-length introduction to The Verve, but I’ve always counted “Bittersweet” under my list of favorites.

Unfortunately, it feels like, with more than a decade since “Urban Hymns,” The Verve were just trying to remember what they sound like. As a result, the experimental, sometimes-overproduced tracks are very hit or miss.

Barry: Lead singer Richard Ashcroft has one of the great voices in new rock. He covers everything from pained to angry to wistful with ease. The band — Simon Jones on bass, Peter Salisbury on drums and Nick McCabe on guitar — pushes him at every turn and sometimes into awkward places.

Casey: Sometimes the vocals are clear, as in “I See Houses,” in which Ashcroft sings a wistful ballad about feeling trapped and cut off.

Other tracks just end up sounding muddled. This could either be because the lyrics are just so much abstract nonsense or because Ashcroft sometimes sings like he’s lying in an armchair under a questionable haze of smoke instead of leaning into the mike. This is most noteworthy in the closing track, “Appalachian Springs.”

Barry: It appears to me that the band viewed every song as a chance to try everything. Sometimes it works, like on “Sit and Wonder” and “Love Is Noise,” and sometimes it makes the songs overworked (“Numbness”).

For me, the album starts out really well and slows down about halfway through. That’s what the skip button is for though, right?

Casey: Many of the songs are also overlong (one is 8:13). Length isn’t necessarily a bad thing — I love Dragonforce’s metal ballads — but here, it makes the songs sound unfocused and stretched thin. See “Columbo,” for example.

Ashcroft’s vocals are distinctive, but I wish he would do a little less inarticulate moaning and a little more singing. It’s like he’s trying really hard to get something across but has had just one cap of Dimetapp too many.

Overall, I can’t say I hated “Forth,” but I can’t recommend if you mind occasionally incoherent lyrics and aren’t willing to indulge the band’s experimental tendencies.

Barry: One of the risks on a project like this, where production is a such a major part of it, is that too much gets thrown in and the song itself loses focus. Overall, I like the record and would like to see these guys live, like at Bonnaroo, but it definitely has some weak moments.