Review: The Feeling, Twelve Stops and Home

The band above are The Feeling. They have an eponymous website with bells and whistles, which you're free to find as you please. I feel you might not need to.

Their new album, out in the UK June 5th, Twelve Stops And Home, is not, in fact, a typographical error referring to some unfortunate addict's struggle to kick the sugar rush of pop music, but it could be.

When someone mentions Supertramp, Bread, 10cc, The Alan Parsons Project and The Beach Boys - well, someone else reaches for their gun. For every mad lover of "Jet" or "Eye In The Sky" there is an equal and opposite personage welling with great hate for such pap - especially people who support the idea that 77 punk was the second coming. Well, The Feeling predicate their very existence on the idea that it was time for an anti-thetical return of the repressed - call them the Soft Negative.

Nothing on their fluffy, sickly-sweet, jaunty, piano-tickling Breakfast-in-America-style album is as good as their pop masters' very best, which is the problem - not the so-bad-it-is-jolly-good stylistic decision to mine the sugar walls of this 70s goldmine of supersweet melodies.

For the record, there are three or four exquisitely good songs here, though they don't seem to all be the planned singles, but here goes: "Kettle's On", "Sewn", "Same Old Stuff" and "Helicopter". "Sewn" stands above these others, and demands an almost OCD-like replaying, so entrancingly upbeat is it.

As attracted as repelled by the honey-trappings, Eyewear gives this 3 specs out of five.

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