LONG before they became every Oasis fan's second favourite act with their best-selling third LP Urban Hymns, The Verve started life as a superb psychedelic rock band.
Released in 1993, the Wigan group's debut LP A Storm In Heaven is a post-shoegaze masterpiece: with Britpop beginning to bubble, Verve (as they were then known) and their trippy guitarscapes like Beautiful Mind and Make It 'Til Monday, the mesmerisingly intense Blue, the rocking Slide Away and skronky acid folk-tinged sprawls like Butterfly and The Sun, The Sea were gloriously unfashionable.
However, for those heads who 'got' it, A Storm In Heaven inspired instant devotion.
The new deluxe reissue features the original album remastered, along with the epic EPs which preceded it (All In The Mind, Gravity Grave etc), B-sides, BBC sessions and unreleased studio tracks, plus an official DVD release for the heavily bootlegged live set at Camden Town Hall in 1992.
While the seeds for The Verve's belated breakthrough were sown with the more tightly structured songwriting of 1995's A Northern Soul (notably its sweeping, string-augmented single, History), regarded by some as their creative high-watermark and now also available as a remastered, bonus content-laden deluxe reissue, there are those who maintain 'Mad Richard' and co never bettered the echo, delay and dope-smoke-swathed freak-outs of those early years.
With eyes closed and the sublime, shimmering groove of A Man Called Sun cranked in your headphones, it's easy to find yourself in enthusiastic agreement.
