Back when anything Britpop-shaped was guaranteed success whatever its merits, Embrace topped the chart with an album apparently fashioned from Oasis's pub-rock discards. The two northern brothers at the helm, Danny and Richard McNamara, even contrived to be cut-rate Gallaghers, one shooting his mouth off indiscriminately, the other glowering silently behind his guitar. Three years later, they're still mirroring Oasis, matching that band's new "dance" influence with what vocalist Danny calls "our controversial new funk direction" - which isn't funky so much as thinly percussive, as if they'd flicked the samba switch on a cheap keyboard.
The public aren't so easily fooled, however, leaving Embrace to make their London comeback at the modest Astoria rather than a Gallagher-sized venue. It's jammed, though, suggesting that at least 1,500 people in the capital find something of value in Embrace's weighty anthems.
What that is isn't clear till halfway through the show. First you have to digest their flumpy indiewear (not very 00s, those baggy black separates) and tap an involuntary finger as the nagging choruses of All You Good, Good People and Come Back To What You Know drag you along in their ponderous wake. Then, as Danny sways self-consciously to his brother's head-down playing, Embrace begin to weave their insidious spell. They may be shamelessly derivative, with their new album, Drawn From Memory, reviving the 90s before they're even cold, but they do it with a good-heartedness that makes them seem like people you'd like to know.
Each song contains a little homily - the surging singalong One Big Family says it all - that sits uneasily in a rock 'n' roll context, but sounds sincere even at its most platitudinous. Danny further kisses goodbye to any hope of future credibility when he whips out a kazoo, the unlikely main instrument on the recent Hooligans single, and demonstrates why no sullen teenager will ever aspire to be a lead kazooist. He comes across as such a nice chap, sacrificing cool for the integrity of the song, and the place accordingly erupts.
They're Oasis with a heart, wanting only to be liked, and some days that's what you need.
