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Rating: Twelve years ago, The Feeling debuted with what would soon prove to be a highly successful debut album, “Twelve Stops And Home.”
By the end of the year, it had sold 900,000 units in Great Britain alone (double platinum) and a total of one and a half million records worldwide, while climbing to the twentieth position on the Top Heatseekers in the United States. Still considered a little gem that almost managed the titan's feat of relaunching soft rock at high commercial levels, it is being re-released this year after a complete remastering and with three bonus discs full of unreleased material.
After this dazzling debut, The Feeling's career fell into a slow and inexorable decline; the second album “Join With Us” reached number one in the UK, taking advantage of the great anticipation but failed to replicate the success of its predecessor, while the two subsequent albums almost completely failed even artistically. We have to wait until 2016 for a good self-titled album, which went almost completely unnoticed given the previous works that led to the audience's disaffection.
This relaunch/nostalgia operation thus has the subtle goal of putting a point and starting over from what was done well in the past; as mentioned, it is an excellent album, certainly propelled by the classic “Sewn” (a rather invasive hit even here in Italy), but also capable of offering authentic pop-rock gems such as “Fill My Little World” and the stellar “Kettle’s On.” However, it's not just a soft and polite album; there are slightly more lively and tight moments like “Love It When You Call,” a successful divertissement à la The Darkness, and the opener “I Want You Now,” which perfectly blend with the melancholic flair of the five from Horsham.
In the second and third discs, we find a rich collection of demos, alternative versions, and covers; noteworthy in this regard are the demos of “This Time” and “Join With Us” which would later be destined for the second album, a fun live cover of the overused “Video Killed The Radio Star,” and an embryonic version of “Sewn” as initially conceived by frontman Dan Gillespie. The fourth disc, instead, offers a rich documentary on the band.
A reissue useful for dusting off a small pop-rock gem from the mid-2000s, perhaps forgotten too soon. It most likely won’t revive a now dormant career like The Feeling's, but it certainly allows us to listen again to a good batch of excellent pop-rock craftsmanship, now increasingly rare.
Best track: Kettle’s On
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