Consider the case of Embrace; five young men from Yorkshire with a mission to make their own musical mark on the world. Your first single is released on Fierce Panda Records and is sold out before it hits the shops; your sibling dynamic that is central to the band leads to obvious and fiercely debated comparisons with another northern group.
These comparisons are not helped by the nature of your songs; grandiose anthems of love, family and solidarity. As Catatonia would have it, you’re equally cursed and blessed.

Which sums it all up really. In their short existence, the boys McNamara have gone from feverously hyped press darlings, to purveyors of kazoo led singles to their last incarnation of, well, pffffffht. It started with a bang and ended with a fizzle. Majestic highs are matched by deflated lows; for every ‘Fireworks’ there’s the, frankly, utter silliness of a ‘Yeah You’.
Embrace have always worn their hearts on their sleeves, done things honestly and have followed their gut instincts every step of the way. Which would explain half the daft things that they’ve done.
The aforementioned kazoo was used in ‘Hooligan’ because Danny wanted a sound similar to that of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Crosstown Traffic’. They covered ‘Three is the Magic Number’ because they thought it would be fun, completely ignorant to the fact that it is an idea as utterly stupid as Happy Mondays doing ‘The Boys are Back in Town’. They played gigs in caves despite the fact they aren’t Julian Cope.

Still, these are the reasons why they’ve left Hut and joined Independiente, where perhaps they’ll be treated better, not the reasons for their diminished popularity. That is slightly more head scratching. Don’t forget that over the space of their first two albums they produced gems such as ‘Now That You’re Nobody’, ‘Come Back To What You Know’, ‘All You Good Good People’, ‘’ and ‘Drawn From Memory’.
Perhaps their weakness lay in their inability to write songs of an equal quality with any sort of tempo. In Embrace-land ballads reigned supreme; rockier songs like ‘The Last Gas’ were full of bluster with little other substance, which explains the direction the band took for their third album, the largely ignored ‘Wonder’.

This singles collection is a reasonably representative selection of their work and serves as a useful reminder of the band’s quality. It’s always hard for bands to start anew once they’ve taken a bit of a popular and critical kicking, especially after starting in such a high position, but if Embrace never do recapture those giddy heights, at least they can say “better than fucking Starsailor”.