The Feeling - 'Join With Us' (Universal) Released 18/02/08

It’s clear what you’re thinking. Crap name. As easy as it may be to slate the band, that would just make us a society of bullies. The difference between this album and their debut is that this one suggests that these pop-rockers didn’t have the ideal childhood that one would expect having heard the previous album and singles. How could we not ‘Join with...’ The Feeling on this sprightly album? It is an easy listening family favourite which is likely to be loved by anyone who is, to put it simply; happy, and preferably uses jazz hands when exclaiming that dinner is on the table.

A band whose influences are Queen and ELO are one that we ought to be weary of. If these were their initial influences, what hope is there for a band derived from them? Well, while snobby Smiths lovers may not be Queen fans, it is impossible to forget the gigantic impact the band had worldwide. So what is the reasoning for this? Detesting something with such delicate power ballads would just make you nothing by a snotty deprecating scrooge. The album is likely to be cherished my many, where the rest of us will remain impartial.

All that said, the album passes us by with little differentiation as we begin with happy song followed by happy song, and ending with happy song. Even the slower, ‘sadder’ songs are still fairly happy sounding such as the track, ‘This Time’ where we are told that ‘it’ll be alright’. Alternative vocabulary could have been used in this description, but the question is, are there many more in The Feelings? Often the songs are too confined to what will be named ‘The Feeling Land’ which is bound up in its own unwaveringly gleeful sound, and should be thus given a status of its own. The more typically bouncy tracks on the album such as ‘Turn It Up’ and ‘I Did It For Everyone’ are the ones that work best. The muted down tracks after all, are never the ones that won any awards.

The slower tracks are contrastingly creepy, they just seem wrong in the way that Dorothy from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ would be if her singing ever wavered away from being consistently up-tempo. ‘Loneliness’? We don’t want to hear The Feeling having heartache thanks very much, or even hinting it, because it just isn’t kind of thing power pop lovers want to pay for. All in all, buy it for your mum, your gran, anyone under the age of fourteen, Abba fans...