There were moments on The Feeling's first album Twelve Stops and Home - more specifically a moment, their debut single Fill My Little World - that made a lot of hardened musos temporarily melt under the weight of its joyful pop catchiness. There's nothing embarrassing or shameful about succumbing to well-written and well-delivered pop, even if it's not the most original you've ever heard. The London-based quintet's second album, Join With Us, unfortunately contains no similar gem that'll catch you off-guard, and displays all the signs of a band who are willingly attempting to move backward, instead of progress forward. If The Feeling's love of soft-rock - ELO, Boston, Supertramp - was established with their first record, this is a blatant exercise in how to wring every available droplet from that wet, mouldy dishrag of a genre. There's no intelligence or craft about any of the tracks on offer here; the extent of Dan Gillespie-Sells's songwriting stretches only to Jimmy Somerville-lite disco synth-pop (I Thought It Was Over) to prog rock (Spare Me, Join With Us), to cheesy, overblown ballads (This Time). Even the most 'quirky' track, Loneliness (i.e. the least embarrassing) is cringeworthy in its wilful attempt at 'edginess'. The best thing that can be said about Join With Us is that it contains the type of infuriating songs that stick in your mind after hearing them on drivetime radio. There's better, more inventive, less lazy pop music out there - the only Feeling you'll be left with after this album is one of impurity, and a bad case of nausea.
