Album Review: The Feeling – San Vito
2 min read
English rock band The Feeling have been hard at it ever since the release of their debut album Twelve Stops And Home. The record saw a plethora of hits, and launched the band onto a indie rock pedestal amongst other high-achievers like Arctic Monkeys, The Hoosiers, and Cage The Elephant. They have continued to release well-received albums in the intervening years, and have returned this year with their seventh album San Vito.
The album begins on a soft note with War’s Not Won, a mix of clean guitars and heavily delayed vocals leading the song. It builds slowly until calming further for the bridge, singer Dan Gillespie-Sells’ distinctive falsetto soaring above the swell. The Right Wrong maintains the same building nature but incorporates staccato pianos and a poppier melody to hook in listeners. Join in the Noise brings the tempo up as well as the strings to make an mid-2000s piano-pop tune reminiscent of songs from their 2006 debut. Its bridge is catchy, the drop out piano section after gorgeously arranged with the orchestral elements and the backing vocals. The first half of the record concludes with I Won’t Sleep Tonight, featuring singer-songwriter Lucie Silvas. It’s a beautiful ballad, taking its time to grow and shift, introducing both vocalists separately before bringing them together in a brilliant duet.
Intermezzo breaks up the album, leading into Sun Won’t Shine, a bouncing, bubbly summer tune with simple but effective lyrics and a groovy bass line. Foul Weather Friend and Call It Home both bring the vibe down, the former a low-key power ballad with juxtaposing lyrics about being there for someone on the worser days, while the latter takes on an early U2 aesthetic with plucky electric guitars and a pretty piano passage. Penultimate track Everyday and All of the Night brings back the groove as well as melding brass sections with an infectious beat. The chorus breaks the instrumental down to piano and vocal, highlighting the loving lyrical content at the heart of the song. Beautiful Lies ends the record with a brooding instrumental that builds gradually, before devolving in the second half into a mysterious, almost noir instrumental section, that concludes the album on an intriguing but poignant note.
San Vito is an interesting listen from a band almost twenty-years in the business. It shows snapshots of youthful energy and invention, much like their debut did, but with an overarching maturity to the lyrics and the arrangements. It’s not a record that will shock long time fans, but it is just as good as accomplished as their earlier material, to the point where new listeners may be swayed into becoming fans.
Writer and Musician, Ryan Bulbeck has been published with a number of online publications, and has worked with a myriad of great artists, both as a performer, and as a producer. His most recent band The 295 are still active, playing shows around the UK.
