Back at the dawn of the 1990s, the sensible money was being placed on THE HOUSE OF LOVE to break through in a big way. They appeared to have it all: Guy Chadwick's songs, cheekbones and charisma; Terry Bickers' mercurially gifted presence on lead guitar; a powerfully inventive rhythm section in Chris Groothuizen and Pete Evans and the sort of smouldering good looks that could have ensured a certain appeal in teen mags as well as the serious press. Oh, and the patronage of one Alan McGee, whose nascent Creation label and management abilities had pushed the band to the brink of much bigger things.
With all these things in the plus column, it's hard to imagine what could possibly have sundered them, but of course we've forgotten that most unpredictable of ghosts in the machine: the human factor. And, with their second album "Fontana" being eased towards its' hungry public, Chadwick and Bickers (both driven and ambitious at the best of times) indulged in one heated argument too many - in the back of their own tour van. In a scene worthy of Liam'n'Noel or Carl'n'Pete, the end result was that Bickers was (literally) ejected from the band and that, in effect, was that.
Yes, yes, I know there were further HOL albums, and for what it's worth neither "Babe Rainbow" or the final "Audience With The Mind" were bad at all (though I confess I haven't returned to them for yonks), but really the buzz disappeared with Bickers. Sure, Guy still had the songs, but - as is so often the case - that indefinable something that sorts the great bands from the chaff had flown away, not to be recaptured.
Until now, that is. For, while Grunge, Britpop and countless other mini-scenes have raged since that time, nothing seems to have been enough to provoke Guy and Terry to patch up their differences. Indeed, at the time of writing this, your reviewer's still not sure if it was a particular incident, or whether Guy or Terry finally just thought "I've had enough of this" and picked up the phone, but one thing's for sure: on the basis of "Days Run Away", you can only think "Thank God for that - oh, and what kept you?"
Because "Days Run Away" is truly way better than we'd right to expect after such a lifetime spent apart. No, I'm not making claims for it as a major sonic leap forward or suchlike, but - for the most part - it really is like they were never away. Whatever personal bones Terry and Guy had to pick, they've clearly both been responsible enough to leave them at the studio door.
Sensibly, the band (with able new boy Matt Jury replacing Groothuizen) have regrouped with former producer/ mixer Pat Collier, but while (most) of the old gang are still here, it's important to note now that if you're expecting a return to the huge sensuous washes of sound that epitomised the classic Creation days, you're wasting your time. At its' toughest, "Days Run Away" maybe reminds a little of the band circa say "I Don't Know Why I Love You", but mostly it sounds simply like a band at ease with itself, sounding lean and direct and ready to be respected all over again.
Opening your new account with a killer comeback single is surely the way ahead, and the HOL have already won that battle with the blissful sunburst of "Love You Too Much". It's the ideal song to kick the album off as well: immediate, sassy and oozing with confidence.
It's not the only place where the feted Bickers/ Chadwick twin guitar attack comes good either. Both the (yes) Velvets-y insistence of "Wheels" - with its' fractured lead guitar - and "Kit Carter" (which quotes from Albert Goldman's "The Lives Of John Lennon" and refers to Lennon's assassination) proffer vintage amyl nitrate cut'n'thrust and pile on the drama. Both recast Bickers in the image of guitar deity a la Johnny Marr or John Perry, while the prodigal one also excels on the sublimely moody "Gotta Be That Way". Delicious and lovelorn, it's driven by Bickers' dark brown baritone strafeing and close-miked harmonies. Really rather lovely.
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Elsewhere, it's perhaps too tempting to take the lyric from "Maybe You Know" too literally as the band's own story (opening gambit: "We had the world, we had the world in the palm of our hands"), before Guy admits "there were times I thought it really couldn't end". But then it could just as easily be a love affair turned cold, and certainly its' mellow and slightly forlorn feel is infectious.
Unusually, too, both the album's centrepieces are actually located slap bang in the centre of the album. "Kinda Love" initially comes on slow and graceful in the "Man To Child" mode, though it speeds up to rival the best bits from the third Velvets' album and reveals a lyric couched in frustration. Once again, it's too easy to read too much into "You're so late and I've gotta wait, and I've got no shoulder to cry on", but it's delivered beautiully and threaded through with Bickers' silver shards of guitar. "Money And Time", meanwhile, is arguably the album's showstopper. It's a gravity-defying groover, with both Evans and Jury (in Jah Wobble dubnology mode) excelling, and Chadwick and Bickers setting up harmonies akin to Cream's "I Feel Free." Not what you'd expect exactly, but superbly realised and dripping with class.
Superficially, both "Already Gone" and the closing "Anyday I Want" seem lightweight and disappointing initially. Certainly the gentle, La's -style buskabilly of the former throws a loop, but Bickers' slide and the ghostly harmonies haul you in after a few listens and while "Anyday I Want" seems a perfunctory acoustic full stop, it's a real grower and it's intriguing the way Guy (I assume deliberately) leaves the song's conclusion open-ended with the simple statement : "I know I can go anyday I want."
But let's not dwell on the long term plans. Bearing in mind their notoriously volatile relationship in the past, that Guy Chadwick and Terry Bickers should have made it back into the studio together seems fantastic in itself, never mind that the end results are so assured and beguiling.
Quite a comeback, then. Perhaps not up there with Lazarus exactly, but certainly a second coming of remarkable vitality. With hindsight, maybe The Stone Roses should have taken fifteen years rather than five over theirs as well.
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