The Hours - Back When You Were Good (A & M)
4/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
When did music start sounding so indisputably good? Sincerely... When did it start sounding as well rounded, crafted and exquisite as The Hours latest single 'Back When You Were Good'?
It's a simple song that's taken a delicate approach to 'powerpop' though still boasts a sense of ambitious drama, and while Genn's voice is conventional it shapes superbly to this marathon track. Its melancholic confidence is adherent to Echo and the Bunnymen or The Farm but with a polish that The Guillemots have introduced us to, the effect being a grand and magnanimous song that spawns a real sense of awe. There's a ghostly remorse that pecks away throughout its some 242 seconds of development and astonishment but judders off any notions that it's a despondent song, far from it in fact as its boosting symphonic is as uplifting as it is unrestrained. Like you'd expect, the finale is brimful of piano punching and tense strings that bring the bent up aggravation of the piece well and truly to the boil, but it's the opening half second that really makes the song. The poignant two piano keys that roll into the undulating, full throttled flood of sound screams at you that this is going be one of those songs that's going to get a regular play for years to come.
Although Genn has previously worked with bands such as Pulp and Elastica, you can't throw this songs tanking chorus line at him as The Hours is effortlessly his crowning moment, making this track the one people will look back at in ten years saying quite profoundly, "back when he was good". That is, of course, only if he turns cack somewhere along the way.
Artists in this article: The Hours
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