The Music - The Music

This is a flashback review of The Music's self-titled debut album which was released back in 2002.  The Music comprise of Rob Harvey on vocals and guitar, Adam Nutter on guitar, Stuart Coleman on bass and Phil Jordan on drums.  So why a review of this album now? Well, the band have recently come back into the limelight in 2021/2022. The trigger was that they did a listening party on twitter in 2021 thanks to Tim Burgees of The Charlatans which is coined Tim's twitter listening party.  Basically, he gets everyone to listen to an album at the same time and bands and fans tweet about their memories and thoughts of the album.  Due to the success of The Music doing the listening party and band feeling the reaction from the fans. They have played two reunion gigs, one in Glasgow and a major hometown show in Leeds just last week.

So that spurred me to go back myself and listen to the albums again and review them.  I did review their 3rd album "Strength in Numbers" at the time, but the first two albums were before my days of reviewing.  But let's go back a step first and I'll tell you how I got into The Music.  I remember listening to Radio 1's evening session which must have been around 2000/2001 and he played their debut single "Take the Long road and walk it" for the first time on national radio.  I thought it was amazing, but I missed the name of the track. So, I emailed Steve, I didn't get a response, but he played the track the next night too and I got the name of it.  They released the single on 7inch was limited to 1000 copies.  I went to Virgin in Glasgow for opening the day it came out, but they had no copies and neither did Avalanche which is now called Love Music.

But later I discovered that the single was released in Europe in CD format which I managed to get hold of on Amazon.  I think it must be quite rare.  On the single it had "Take the long road and walk it" and the instrumental track "The Walls get smaller" which is also excellent.  Instead of releasing more singles and then releasing an album.  The Music went down the EP route and released "You might as well try to (rude word) me EP and then The People EP.  From those EPs "Too High" and "The People" made it on to the debut album.  But I should note these EPs are awesome and the fact they only put 2 tracks out of 8 songs over the EPs on the debut album shows just how good the album was going to be.

And the album was released in 2002 and debuted at number 4 in the UK charts.  This album propelled them into being a very decent sized band and my favourite band for many years to come, till the release cycle of Strength in Numbers came to an end and their eventual split in 2011.  There was something about them which made them really stand out.  The music they made was basically rock music you could dance to.  But not like waltzes or how you would dance to pop music.  This was dancing away which was completely carefree to the point you would completely lose yourself in the music. It was that good and I found myself in that situation in the many times I have been to see them play live.

On the album itself there is not one bad track and there is a finally tuned balance between the slower tracks and the more up-tempo tracks and those that go between the two.  The singles were all singalong, rocking, monsters of tracks.  "Take the Long Road and Walk it", "The People", "The Getaway" and "The truth is no words".  All taking their own journey in terms of sounding different but all reaching the same destination in sounding absolutely mega.  My personal favourite and it remains my favourite The Music song is "The People".  The intro, the riff, Rob's vocal performance; All completely on point and the chorus is just so infectious and catchy.

Many albums rely on their singles to prop them up and to get those sales and the rest can often be filler. But not The Music.  They use it as an opportunity to flex their musical muscle.  Songs like "Human" and "Turn off the light" are slightly longer tracks which build up to climaxes more as the songs go on.  "Float" is probably my favourite deep cut, particularly later in the track as it goes into frenzied chaos and totally cuts off at the end of the track before floating into "Turn off the light".  "The Dance" I wouldn't call an anthem as it doesn't have the catchiest chorus but being the first track on the album it does give a sign of things to come.  "Disco" is another one which is a slow burner, but the chorus and the swaggering riff is truly breath-taking.  

Final track "Too high" is an epic way to finish the album and really does tell the story of how they got to the point of releasing the album.  Through the lyrics "Too hard, too high, too hard to climb" Rob tells the story of how people would tell the band that making it in the music industry was too hard and they shouldn't bother.  Well, they sure showed the nae sayers that's for sure.  This song for me showed off Adam Nutter's guitar work at his finest.  Those who listen to this album on streaming services will be like, hang on "Too High" is not the last track, "New instrumental" is.  But this is a bonus track.  In fact, when listening to this on CD. To listen to it you have to go to track 1 and rewind it so that it is negative time.  This track as you guessed it, is purely instrumental.  Probably one of their weaker tracks as it is a bit too repetitive and long for me but that's just because The Music set themselves such a high bar of quality. Occasionally you're going to get some which slip through.

Overall, this is still one of my all-time favourite albums.  It was a landmark album in my life and really all that's left to be said is thank you to The Music for the music.