Weekly > Reviews
Embrace - This New Day
The career of Embrace has been a strange one, touted as the next Oasis with the release of their first album The Good Will Out. Then things started to fade a little with Drawn From Memory, before they looked like they were finished after their third long player If You’ve Never Been bombed.
The only thing that seemed to keep them going was the fact that they had developed something of a reputation for putting on great live shows in strange places, a car park and a forrest to name just two of the more bizarre venues. The public though are a fickle bunch and tend to have short memories when it comes to music, some members of the band had started taking day jobs in order to pay the rent as it seemed musically things had run their course.
Then a stroke of luck….one which they probably did deserve for being the nicest blokes in rock music if nothing else. Chris Martin it turns out is a friend of Danny McNamara and he has just written X & Y the new Coldplay album. He has a song kicking around which he thinks might suit Embrace more than it does his band, that song is called Gravity and the rest as they say is history.
So we fast forward past the massive selling Out Of Nothing album and that brings us neatly to album number five This New Day. Released in the last few weeks its already spawned the bands biggest single to date in Nature’s Law which reached number two, with the album itself going one better and hitting the top spot. Things are again rosy in camp Embrace and the future looks bright…well commercially for me, not artistically.
I think the situation for me was summed up by a work colleague of mine as we were travelling back from Manchester to Bradford after a business trip, four of us in the car and we are listening to Hacienda Classics, an airport purchase from the driver of the car. One of our fellow passengers known now as Kronenburg, having witnessed what she’s like after two pints of the stuff, she is unhappy with the music. That’s fair enough as she is as far as I know approaching fifty and she missed out on the dance era. So to appease her we put on the new Embrace album to see if that’s more to her liking. Straight away she says “that’s better, its got more melody at least”. After a while though ( I think we make it to track five) she’s getting bored with this as well. “He’s a bit whiny isn’t he, it all sounds the same”.
- Embrace
- This New Day (2006)
- Category: Album
- Label: Independiente
- Reviewed by: Kev
- Published on: 16 Apr 2006
- Comments: 0
- Beat Surrender Rating:
Weblinks
Add to favouritesShe has of course hit the nail on the head, what This New Day lacks is any form of variety, but more importantly the songs lack heart, which is something that has always been in early Embrace songs. It starts off promisingly with the upbeat No Use Crying and the recent single, but hen tracks like You Will Hit The Target Everytime is like a plodding U2 at their worst, I Can’t Come Down is a wet ballad and Even Smaller Stones is a stuttering rocker. Even Exploding Machines is droning despite attempts to liven it up pace wise.
That unfortunately is now Embrace’s target audience as well, Radio 2 listeners who’ll love the chorus and the ease of listening, but they won’t be the ones that remember Embrace for the spark they had when they first started out, I’ll try and keep that memory fresh in the hope that they can get back to that one day. On the (lack of ) strength of this though I have to say I’m worried and hearing that they’ve got the England World cup song could be the final nail in their coffin for me.
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