With the public lapping up the quirky, ELO-referencing stylings of The Hoosiers and Mika, it looks as though album number two from The Feeling could follow suit, taking over the charts in the way their debut effort Twelve Stops And Then Home didn’t quite manage. Groan-worthy though this fact may seem to some, the album itself isn’t so bad. The opener ‘I Thought It Was Over’ is a pulsing disco monster that slaps high-fives with all the 70s pop clichés we secretly adore. Sure, ‘Without You’ relies too much on some rather too hopeful rhymes with the word ‘London’, but the title track marries Hunky Dory-era Bowie with Brian May guitar squeals to produce a delightful whole. That it closes with the kind of gloriously cheesy coda that would have The Darkness hiding behind their Def Leppard collections only seals the deal.
Some might deride them for over-egging the pudding, but – to be frank – that’s their appeal. Guitars yowl, pianos are pounded and harmonies pile up so high they come close to toppling over. But there’s variety here, too: when they leave the glam-rock out, you’d swear they’d nabbed a few tricks from some sweet-toned Swedish tunesmith. Elsewhere, the eerie first half of ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ nicely balances the moments of twee delight.
Here and there they show themselves too fond of the kind of vocal effects best left on a Queen album, but Join With Us proves The Feeling are the band most likely to give power-pop a good name.