Inaura - This Month's Epic

(Click on the blog entry title to see the video - Sorry, embedding not allowed again!)

Label: EMI
Year of Release: 1996

Ah, cruel, fickle finger of fate... it could and should have been very different for Inaura. Featuring Dave Formula out of Magazine as their keyboard player, the band had pedigree to begin with, and then seemed to be riding on what was supposed to become the giant wave of a new musical movement -namely Romo, the New Romantic revivalist scene created by the magazine Melody Maker.

I became aware of them at the time the first single "This Month's Epic" was issued, as their press officer phoned me at home raving about this band who (in his words) "are like a combination of all the best bits of The Verve and Duran Duran". Clearly he'd never read my student magazine column (and fair play to him, nobody else did either) or he'd never have bothered using those two acts as being a benchmark of any kind of superior quality. Nonetheless, with nothing better to do I went along to see them live that night and was blown away. In between hard techno squelches and eighties synth pop leanings were indeed enormous, epic, meandering songs which recalled the majesty of The Walker Brothers. There were unquestionably elements of Duran Duran in the mix - only a fool would claim otherwise - but there was more ambition here, and a lot more aggression and frustration in their sound. They had taken eighties pop and given it a much harder edge.

"This Month's Epic" in particular is marvellous. It's rare that songs longer than eight minutes justify their own run times. Most just repeat and repeat and forget to fade. TME, on the other hand, begins atmospherically, builds into a woe-ridden chorus, then eventually soars in the manner that The Stone Roses best songs all soared. It may sound rather pretentious in places, but then great pop very frequently is.

Rather unfortunately, the music press totally hated them, killing their career off straight away. In their Duran Duran theiving electronic noises, combined with an indie sensibility, though, you can hear a lot of modern noughties music, not least The Killers. It's just this is so much better. Listen and you'll agree