The days when Embrace flipped up their collars like four flat-vowelled Fonzies and came on like bestriding our world truly was their birthright seems a real fu**ing age away now. Sure, Oasis might have pulled it off but, looking back, one brace of mouthy flophairs giving it all that 'cock o' the north' shit was enough.
All in all, plans hatched over bunkbeds probably should be left unfulfilled. But, hey we were young and those were heady times for us indie types and Christ, we fell for far worse than Embrace. It's just that the likes of the 60 Foot Dolls had the good grace to walk away before anybody got unduly bored.
Tellingly it's the songs from their first album, 'The Good Will Out', that raise the loudest, beeriest cheers tonight. 'Fireworks' still manages to raise a crackle, it's slow, melancholy fizz easily the best thing we hear, the one time in fact that the band's self-aggrandising claims towards greatness actually rang true. Other than that the sparks always were too few and far between. When it mattered, that all-important stardust was way too sparsely scattered and so it is here. Weren't Then Jericho run out of town for this kind of hobnailed bluster?
Rumours that this might be their valedictory tour have abounded recently and Danny, in a voice pointing more to a future career carrying bricks than carrying a tune, is quick to shout them all down. "We ain't goin' fuckin' anywhere, right" might hint at defiance but it still sounds more like the last throw of some holed-up old biddy in the path of a new motorway development than a rock 'n' roll group still going places. The sad fact is that if Embrace do end up jacking it all in we might not actually notice.
Whatever magic this group might once have conjured up has long since left them. The new songs are sketches drawn in sludge, the old ones worn and out-on-their-feet tired. Embrace might once have talked a good fight but ultimately they just couldn't cut it. They might well have reached out for the stars but in truth they rarely cleared the outhouse roof. "I'll never
let you down….." they sang. Too late lads. You promised us the Earth and we ended up with kazoos.
