After five million sales and a double-platinum singles collection, Feeder’s self-financed 2010 offering Renegades suggested that, if rock operated on a barter system, Grant Nicholas would happily trade a few gold discs for a little of the Foo Fighters’ hard rock credibility.
Recorded partly during the same sessions, the band’s eighth studio album finds Nicholas still shaking off this grungy hangover, notably on the cantankerously tuneful Tiny Minds and Idaho. Mercifully, this clearing of the creative pipes means that the radio friendly unit shifters familiar to fans of Comfort In Sound have returned, too.
Oh My and Boarders are fist-pumping anthems built for the festival circuit, while the events of last summer are a recurring theme, ‘The kids are kickin’/Riotin’ on the pavements/Feeding their addiction’ hollers Nicholas on Headstrong over the sort of bubblegum riff Green Day would trade their Generation X albums for.
Rousing, impassioned, unashamedly commercial: Feeder back to their best, in other words.
