If the idea of a Verve comeback album in 2008 seems less momentous than it should — particularly in the wake of recent, more hotly anticipated reunions by alt-rock trailblazers like the Pixies and My Bloody Valentine — it may be due to the fact the Britpop veterans had already made one: 1997’s Urban Hymns, which heralded the surprising rebirth of a band that had initially announced its dissolution in 1995. But even coming after a 10-year post-Hymns hiatus, Forth is not so much a comeback as a come-down — a term that speaks as much to the album’s heady, meandering vibe as to our expectations that the band would return with a renewed sense of purpose. Instead, Forth attempts to reconcile the band’s early, free-form excursions with the symphonic-soul balladry that’s become frontman Richard Ashcroft’s stock-in-trade, but ultimately plays to neither strength, displaying little of the rhythmic thrust and feedback fury that made 1993’s A Storm in Heaven an essential shoegazer document, nor the pop-song economy that made Urban Hymns a multi-million seller. And even when the band strikes the right psych/soul balance, as on the slow-motion sway of “Judas,” the sense of reverie is undone by sore-thumb couplets like “New York, I was Judas / She said, ‘A latte double shot for Judas.’” Then again, seeing as they’ve re-entered a music industry that’s vastly different than the one that made them stars a decade ago, perhaps The Verve are simply looking to Starbucks as the last hope for music retail.