Music

There exists a personality disorder – becoming ever more prevalent in our celebrity-obsessed times –  whereby anyone who’s assumed a high-profile alter ego may well be unable to even tell their two selves apart. Something similar has happened to The Feeling. Before they became the most played act on British radio in 2006 (racking up a mind-melting average of 267 spins per day) and sold 800,000 copies in the UK alone of their debut album, ‘Twelve Stops And Home’, the five-piece spent several ski seasons playing resort bars as a covers band. All that rote learning of other artists’ material has clearly done for them, because The Feeling – rather ironically – don’t appear to have a single sentient fibre in their collective body.  

What they do have is a superior talent for pastiche, but then, you might as well say extruding machines have a superior talent for making sausages. The level of invention here extends only so far as the splicing together of a bunch of often bewilderingly incompatible elements, many of them unspeakably ghastly in the first place. It’s as if The Feeling got their music scores mixed up one night in the Alps and hit upon that as a technique for writing their own, spectacularly grisly, MOR songs. Plus there’s more pompous guitar work than is decent even for the Queen worshippers they are and the most hilariously inept crack at ‘Gaelic rock’ imaginable (‘Connor’). ‘It’s a rock ’n’ roll disaster,’ Dan Gillespie Sells sings in ‘Turn It Up’. Couldn’t agree more, matey.