Album review: Money – The Shadow Of Heaven
Money - The ShadowOf Heaven - Credit: Archant
Big ideas and cathedral echoes converge on early-’90s indie and defiant self-belief on this arresting debut.
This Manchester-based quartet marked their arrival by playing a former bag factory from within a wooden cage.
Inspired by their introduction to music - church hymns, school assemblies - Money create music with a lofty sense of purpose.
But you won’t find Oasis fans clamouring for Jamie Lee’s broken-voiced pleas in Hold Me Forever, full of cathedral-like echo and more than a hint of indulgent, early Verve.
Goodnight London is the most conventional, a piano ballad meandering through a misty, lonely vision of our early-hours capital.
Elsewhere the spirit, love and loss, and man’s condition in the modern world are explored while treading the line between ethereal nobility and rambling nonsense - and people will no doubt come down on both sides.
Mostly, it works, Cruelty Of Godliness certainly feeling holy, if not hymnal, and the widescreen washes of Who’s Going To Love You Now and intimate piano and gritty, urban observations of closing track Black, all making for an evocative listen.
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Rating: 3/5
