The Verve Pipe

[The Minstrel in the Gallery]

I was looking through my old collection of tapes from the nineties and found "Villians" by the Verve Pipe. The only song I remembered was their single The Freshmen so I popped the tape into a player. It turned out that the album was close to a masterpiece with some truley original and beautiful songs. Any fans still around of this long forgotten 90s treasure.

[Krash100]

the only Verve Pipe stuff I've heard is songs that some dumb Kazaa users mislabeled when I tried to download stuff by The Verve.

**since gone back to legal music after such horrifying experiences

[soniclovenoize]

YES! I ****ing lvoe this band...

Most people don't know (actually, most are like "Didn't they do that Bitterswet Symphony song?") that The Freshman was unlike the rest of that record, and the remainder of the album was fantastic. The song Real I tink really captures what the band was going for, the post-Nirvana slick alt-rock thing meets the Sgt. Pepper era Beatles. I picked that album up a month ago, and it did stand the test fo time. I DID skip Teh Freshman though...

I highly recomend the album they made after Villans, it's just self-titled. The cover has a frog on it, appearing dissected wiht the songtitles pointed out as a diagram of the frog's innards. Great Great album... There were no hits and the band faded awayb into One Hit Wonder obscurity, although it was a fantastic record, better than Villains.

They made another record after that called Underneath with their drummer penning half the songs. It wa sproduced by adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne/That Thing You Do fame, and it was horrible. The bass player (who was the singer's brother actually) quit the band becasue he fealt they sold out. I did too.

Also beware fo their first two albums I've Suffered a Head Injury and Pop Smear. But if you wanna get real sneaky, try to find a disc they put out called 85 on 31, which was a promo-only release of b-sides, rarities, remixes, alternate and live tracks. It includes their take on Strewberry Fields Forever...