Opening with the acidic “Jesus What A Jerk”, While the band is more effective on the more traditional straightahead rock than on the experiments. While it’s not as cohesive an effort, “Jesus What a Jerk” is probably their best pop song to date. “Some Disenchanted Evening” was The Verlaines third album and has all the brilliance of the band’s previous “Bird Dog“.
Released in 1990, “Some Disenchanted Evening” sees Graeme Downes and co. taking a more traditional rock approach – and one that can be bitterly sardonic at times. The result is eleven tracks, stripped-back to reveal the gossamer beauty that underlies the band. Alongside the cut-and-thrust structure of the songs, “Some Disenchanted Evening” yet again displays the breadth, depth and subtlety of Downes musical ideas.
Trouser Press wrote that “the album’s coda, a piano ballad styled after Randy Newman, is actually the collection’s crowning achievement; harnessing a dapper melody to a bitterly sardonic lyric about failure, it reveals new-found subtlety and clarity in [Graeme] Downes’ writing.
The New York Times called the album “full of complex melodic variations, crescendos and elegant tempo shifts; the music has the theatrical grandeur of a symphony within the confines of rock.
After years of leading the Verlaines as a trio, Downes added a second guitarist to the group for this record, and the results are apparent from the very first moments of the album’s bracing opener, “Mission of Love,” by far the band’s most electrified tune ever. With the strings, reeds and genre exercises largely shelved, this is a true rock’n’roll album (arguably the Verlaines’ first), and Downes rises to the occasion with enough top-drawer material to mark him as one of the best singer/songwriters currently plying the trade. Choice cuts abound, including “This Valentine” (an exhortation for a romantic fool to get over it already), “Stay Gone” (a send-off to a departed lover) and the title track (one of rock’s most effective odes to a raped environment).
The Verlaines are a New Zealand rock band from Dunedin. Named after the French symbolist poet and fronted by a classical music student, the Verlaines hail from Dunedin, New Zealand, the same hometown as the Chills and the Clean. originally formed in 1981 by Graeme Downes, Craig Easton, Anita Pillai, Phillip Higham and Greg Kerr, the band went through multiple line-ups.
Originally released April 30th, 1990
The Fat Angel Sings 