Album Review: InMe - Phoenix: The Best Of InMe

Four albums into their career, Essex’s very own InMe have decided its time for a Best Of Compilation. The band say that this record represents the end of a chapter for them rather than the end, and there are three brand new tracks interspersed throughout the CD to appease the diehard fan. However, for those who lost track after their much-lauded debut ‘Overgrown Eden’, it serves as a good reminder that the band still exist.

InMe have clearly spent a bit of time thinking about the track-listing for ‘Phoenix’. The tracks are not in chronological order, which makes for a refreshing change; and the three new songs are mixed among the previously released. Of the three new tracks only one stands out as being any good, and that’s closing track ‘Saccharine Arcadia’. Opening with a seriously heavy riff, the track sounds like the band took their trademark sound, polished it up and then pumped it full of beef. It’s a promising note to end the chapter on. The other two tracks are rather unimpressive, ‘Bury Me Deep Beneath Your Skin’ is just very dull, whereas ‘Thanks For Believing Me’ is just plain awful. Macpherson’s voice can grate at the best of times, and mixed with the relatively lowkey instrumentation of this track it’s just plain wrong.

As for the rest of the album, the tracks on the whole are very distinctive of the album they originally appeared on. The best tracks seem to come from 2007 album ‘Daydream Anonymous’. ‘Crack The Whip’ and ‘Myths And Photographs’ are sensational, they take the elements that worked so well on 'Overgrown Eden' (melody and awesome riffs), update them and add some technicality. The guitars on ‘Cracking The Whip’ are frantic and furious as well as being complex, and urge the listener to reach for repeat.

At the opposite end of the spectrum tracks like ‘Safe In A Room’ and ‘Chamber’ (both from ‘White Butterfly’) sound tired and dull. The tracks hardly registered on a complete listen of the album, and it was only taking the album a track at a time when their existence was even apparent.

Ultimately the tracks that bought InMe to the attention of the mainstream rock press, such as ‘Underdose’ and ‘Firefly’ still sound good, despite clearly being of their time. The repetitive structure of ‘Underdose’ particularly shows the bands immaturity at the time, and makes the overblown technicality of ‘All Terrain Vehicle’ show how far the band have come. Many of the tracks from ‘Herald Moth’, the band’s latest opus, sound very confused. Having found a sound that suited them on ‘Daydream Anonymous’, the way the band flit from nods to Rush (‘Nova Armada’) and Silverchair(‘All Terrain Vehicle’) is frustrating, particularly when they hit the heights of a bad parody band on ‘Single Of The Weak’. It’s hard to tell whether the message of this track is supposed to be ironic or whether the irony of singing about the shit on the radio over a cheesy synth-based backbeat was just lost them. Either way it doesn’t work.

‘Phoenix’ serves as a good archive of the fact that InMe didn’t disappear at the end of 2003, and contains some seriously good tracks. As most of these tracks appear on the same album, it might just be worth tracking down ‘Daydream Anonymous’ instead. This isn’t the end for InMe, but how much more they have to bring to the table remains to be seen.

3/5

'Phoenix – The Best Of InMe' by InMe is released on September 27th on Graphite Records.

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Dan Issitt