Garbage Days Revisited #42: Embrace - "Drawn From Memory" (2000)

 

"You can steal the scene but you're blind and the magic'll leave you feeling hollow..." - Embrace - Drawn From Memory

I've mentioned before that local identity is often a strong factor when it comes to becoming a fan of bands and Embrace are probably the ultimate example of this. I should, by all rights, have hated them - they were basically written off by their detractors as a lazy cross between Oasis and the Verve (at the time when the Gallaghers were hawking around the dead-on-arrival Be Here Now). But somehow, put it down to GOC loyalty or put it down to the fact that they probably had more strings to their bow than a lot of people gave them credit for, I actually quite liked them.

I think it might actually have been my little sister who lent me her copy of Embrace's second single The Last Gas (they'd started out on my indie label of choice Fierce Panda with the original release of All You Good Good People a few months before). To be honest, listening back to it now, it's actually quite striking how different to their later output it sounds - the group had originally come up during the shoegazing era (they actually played at a free festival I went to as my second ever gig way way back in 1993 supporting the Senseless Things and Cud but I honestly don't remember anything about them on the day). I remember Melody Maker comparing them to Swervedriver and both The Last Gas and its follow-up One Big Family definitely bear that out a bit with their distorted guitars and bellowed vocals. Arguably, what was more in keeping with what was to follow was tucked away on the B-side with the two ballads, the gentle Now You're Nobody and the piano-led Fireworks. Again, they're the sort of songs that the fortysomething me would probably roll his eyes at but in that era where I was still experiencing things for the first hundred times or so, I quite liked them (the fact that I had a girlfriend at the time who I was convinced I was going to spend the rest of my life with and was in quite a happy place at the time probably helped...ah the naivety of 18-year-olds' definition of love...)

It would be a re-released All You Good Good People that well and truly broke Embrace, taking them all the way into the Top 10 and marking them out as Oasis' chief challengers to the trad-Britpop throne. I'll be honest, over-familiarity has kind of dulled it a bit in the intervening years but when I first heard it a couple of weeks after having my heart broken by Be Here Now, it really felt as if Embrace were the band gunning for the Gallaghers' throne and it evidently had Noel worried enough to sneeringly comment that "those lads want to take some singing lessons" (which also kind of makes me wonder if he'd ever actually heard his brother sing!).

However, it was after this that things seemed to stall a bit for Embrace - single number five Come Back To What You Know was basically All You Good Good People in a different key while the one after that My Weakness (Is None Of Your Business) was essentially Fireworks with the words changed a bit. When the group's debut album The Good Will Out saw the light of day, it got more of a lukewarm reception - at the time I thought this was harsh but listening back to it now with twenty years' hindsight, the main criticisms of the group only really having two song types in the big lighters aloft ballads (Retread, the title track) and the shoutalong indie stadium anthems (Higher Sights, You've Got To Say Yes) isn’t completely without merit I’m afraid - the band are good at what they do but their scope does sound a wee bit limited on this one. Although it did well commercially and spawned three Top 10 hits, there was a general feeling among the indie press as 1998 turned into 1999 that Embrace might struggle to follow it up without repeating themselves.

Which made what came afterwards all the more surprising - the group's second album Drawn From Memory, released in 2000, showed that the group had grown impressively with the sound taking in funk (kazoo-honking comeback single Hooligan which certainly saw them moving outside their comfort zone a bit), psychedelia and alt-rock as well as packing in plenty of the big anthemic songs they'd originally made their way with.

The album's second single You're Not Alone was a case in point - sure, it was another All You Good Good People style big lighters in the air effort but it had a tune and singalong chorus that was just absolutely undeniable and I'd still class it as my favourite Embrace song to date. Similarly, although the stark piano ballad of the title track wasn't anything the group arguably hadn't done on the debut, it just worked really well - for some reason it reminded me of one of the stripped down numbers the Style Council had done on Confessions of a Pop Group (another album I've always thought was very underrated). Yeah You meanwhile was a snotty slice of alt-rock and third single Save Me had an almost baggy style shuffle underpinning it. Basically, Drawn From Memory is the sound of a group basically picking all their favourite '90s bands (there's a bit of Nick Cave in there, a bit of the Charlatans, a bit of the Boo Radleys and plenty more besides), throwing them into the pot and adding their own stamp to come up with something pretty damn good. Although it didn't quite match the sales of The Good Will Out, to these ears it's the better album by some way and deserves to be remembered more fondly than it is.

Unfortunately I think the lack of sales might have spooked the McNamara brothers - while The Good Will Out spawned three Top 10 hits, only You're Not Alone out of the four singles from Drawn From Memory got anywhere near that level peaking at number 12. The result saw them beat a hasty retreat to their first album sound on their third album If You've Never Been and it just felt like a massive step backwards to me, real by-numbers stuff. It wasn't even especially awful, just really dull for the most part. Even worse, it didn't give them the sales spike they were clearly hoping for with both singles from it stalling in the lower half of the Top 40 and the group were dropped by their label Hut soon afterwards and went on temporary hiatus. They made their comeback with a song written by the guy from Coldplay (a band who'd been their support group a few years earlier) in the watery ballad Gravity and that's pretty much when I wandered off.

Embrace are, of course, still a going concern and still capable of chalking up Top 5 albums to this day although I'll be honest and say that I've kind of drifted away from them since the mid-noughties so couldn't really tell you much about their more recent stuff. Bizarrely me and my then housemate did run into Mick, their keyboardist, in our local in Heaton in the late noughties and ended up having a few pints with him. He was a thoroughly nice bloke who was happy to chat to us and tell us some stories about life in the band (they still didn't like Noel Gallagher all those years later!) and it was a good evening all round. Anyway, I still say that Drawn From Memory is a genuinely great album that the world kind of missed at the time and shows Embrace soaring away from their stadium balladry security blanket to great effect. It's just a bit of a shame that they essentially decided to clip their own wings so soon afterwards...