It's always difficult to scrutinise a band's output after they've suffered a major personal tragedy. Indeed, even if it's a band you've never truly rated, the tendency is to pull back the critical heavy armoury for fear of overstepping the line.
FEEDER, though, are busily demonstrating - with no lttle panache - that knee-jerk sympathy really isn't necessary as their fourth album "Comfort In Sound" (their first since the awful suicide of drummer Jon Lee) is by some way their best and most poised record to date.
The two previous singles culled from the album, "Come Back Around" and "Just The Way I'm Feeling" were both decent singles, but the beautifully-weighted "Forget About Tomorrow" is quite probably their best single yet.
Although I'm a little uneasy about such parallels, it's difficult to shake off comparisons with the Manics in terms of a band losing an important member of the team, yet still coming back with a record with the sort of gravitas the Manics summoned with "A Design For Life", but this is the one to both pull a similar trick AND - once and for all - obliterate the image of Feeder as the hamfisted Nirvana wannabes of yore.
Couched in a string arrangement that recalls the Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight Tonight", "Forget About Tomorrow" is yearning, melancholia at its' best, with Grant Nicholas not even trying to hide the hurt as he sings lines like: "Twisting, constricting...on the edge for you, you know I'd jump right through." Moving, in a word.
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Healthily, the two B-sides are equally impressive. "Lose The Fear" introduces itself with a lonely vibes sample and features loops, "Strawberry Fields"-style mellotron and the sort of downbeat mellow vibe you'd never previously have associated with this lot in a million years. By the time the EP climaxes with a lovely, forlorn acoustic take of "Tinseltown" (which old eagle ears here can tell is built on a loop of Simon Kirke's drums from Free's "Mr. Big") the image of Feeder as a band transformed seems set in stone.
Short on pathos and/ or self-pity, but long on dignity, "Forget About Tomorrow" is a positively excellent single. It's sad to relate, but Feeder's loss has been our gain.
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