Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 18/02/08
Label: Island

When people talk about difficult second albums, they're usually picturing furrowed brow angst rockers toiling in a studio to take their sound "to the next level" while rummaging through broadsheets for important topics to tackle. But it's actually harder for a pure pop outfit, where freshness of sound and energy of approach are so vital. How to retain these, while not straying too far from the sound that made you popular in the first place? Just look at The Feeling's radio-hogging predecessors, Scissor Sisters, who delivered a second album almost exactly the same as the first, only drained of life and tunes.

So rejoice, pop fans! "Join With Us" is a triumph, a supermarket sweep of gorgeous melodies, nagging hooks and that slight silliness at the heart of all great pop. The ingredients which made "12 Stops From Home" 2006's most loveable and rewarding record are still here - the brash harmonies, the instrumental variety, Dan Gillespie Sells' direct and tender songwriting - but with an added fearlessness which success seems to have lent them. As if to answer worries that they were about to go "But, Seriously…" on us, opener "I Thought It Was Over" is The Feeling turned up to 11, with its Brian May guitar squalls, manic pianos and mammoth harmonies.

A whole album as hyperactive would be exhausting, of course, but unlike the majority of indie plodders, The Feeling have real range. So second song "Without You" is dreamily paced and melancholy, with a chorus so soft and gorgeous you want to sink into it. Indeed, almost any song could be a single, whether the revved up FM-rock of "Turn It Up", the swaggering "Don't Make Me Sad" or the acoustic closer "The Greatest Show On Earth", which is The Feeling with the glitter scraped off, low-key and piercingly sad.

Why have this band succeeded where many others failed? It's the sincerity, stupid. While the worst pop is teeth-grindingly cynical and focus grouped (let's call this Mika-ism), the best is sonically and emotionally exuberant (Bolan-ism). Just hear the call to arms of the title track, a giddy denunciation of cynicism almost nobody else could have written. Or how about "Loneliness", which turns the leaden misery of the title emotion into pop gold, courtesy of fizzy synths, new wave melodies and an enormous pub singalong of a chorus.

There are a couple of stumbles - notably the cloying "Connor", the drab "Spare Me" - but the overall sound of "Join With Us" is of a pop band at the top of their game. If you're one of the many foolish people who hate The Feeling, then tough luck in every sense: unless you avoid radios and televisions for the whole of 2008, you are going to hear an awful lot more of them. For the rest of us, this is a hell of a start to spring.

    by Jaime Gill