Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Dear Anxiety
As we've conceded a few times, sometimes big albums go right past us.
It was as recently as 2017 that we finally got around to hearing the Eagles' mega-blockbuster, two-in-every-home album Hotel California.
Two years before that we got around to hearing the Feelers huge debut album from 1998 Supersytem for the first time when it was reissued.
It had topped the charts and won them five music awards.
By the time we got to it however they'd run their course although there seems to be another summer tour on the horizon after a long hiatus.
Despite the indifference and often opprobrium of critics, no one can deny their successes: three number one albums and the chart-topping Best Of '98-'08, two others top 10; sold-out tours and awards.
It's been more than a decade since their Hope Nature Forgives and the jaundiced might note they return with a summer tour announcement and a “reimagined” album like U2's recent Songs of Surrender, a kind of self-tribute.
But when archival local albums are given vinyl resurrection (Golden Harvest, Tadpole, Split Enz and the Finn Brothers) and groups re-form after lengthy absences (Space Waltz nearly 50 years on, Strawpeople almost 20), then maybe we shouldn't be quite so cynical about this one.
With orchestration and string arrangements by keyboard player Steve Small and Andrew Walters, and Greg Haver's punchy production, Reimagined deserves a fair hearing.
Supersystem has earnest uplift with melodramatic Middle Eastern-influenced orchestration in the final third, Fishing for Lisa is recast as a melancholy piano ballad with mournful strings and the revised As Good As It Gets is superior to the original.
Singer/songwriter James Reid crafted memorable songs -- whether you liked them or not – and, in more ragged voice 20 years on, sounds committed to Larger Than Life and Pressure Man (the latter with stabbing and oppressive strings and horns, far removed from the emo-angst of the original).
The new song Dear Anxiety and the re-hit Stand Up sit within contemporary American country.
Certainly this takes itself very seriously (rendering “don't play the tortured artist with me” on The Fear a bit ironic), some arrangements are overwrought and others come as deja-heard (Peter Gabriel and U2 ticked off) which can make for heavy going.
But – as we said about the Supersystem reissue – push aside preconceptions and prejudice . . . and the the question whether former Feelers' fans actually want this.
Sampled judiciously, Reimagined comes with the headline, or consumer warning if you will: Feelers In 'Not Bad Album' Shock!
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Reimagined; Greatest Hits is available now on vinyl, CD and digitally
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