Released on 23/04/07
Label: Truck

Don't tell Johnny Borrell, but ambition doesn't have to be number one singles, Wembley tour dates and - who knows, one day, please God - featuring in a Pepsi Cola advert. Ambition can be modest and humble, can be the tiring, near mundane search for that simple sliding key change, that new and beautiful sound, the ability to bruise a tender heart. In which case, The Electric Soft Parade are as ambitious as they come.

Indeed, the third album by the Brighton prog-poppers is practically the anti-Razorlight: sincere where they are cynical, melodically subtle where they wield sledgehammers, brimming with ideas where they endlessly flog one. Which is not to say that it's obscure or inaccessible: indeed, songs like the sprightly power pop of "Misunderstanding" start from a basic Kinks basic riff before gradually blooming into the kind of whoozy keyboard psychedelia of "Never Forever" era Kate Bush.

But the most important difference is that far from insulting the listener through condescension or banality, The Electric Soft Parade pay the great compliment of creating music that is dense, subtle and layered, filled with new textures and deft touches to be repay repeat listening. Take the gorgeous opener, "No Need To Be Downhearted", with its intimate, sliding vocals, before a sudden, stirring organ blows the song wide open, or the way "Secrets" is almost skeletal and hushed before an incredibly graceful blast of brass lifts it to its close.

Lyrically, the album is the familiar morose indie fare focusing on the fear of growing up and regret-streaked nostalgia, but what makes this an album to warm the heart rather than drain it, is in the heartfelt, emotive, colour-drenched sound. There's the tumbling, gleeful melodies that carry "Life In The Backseat" along, or the fizzy synths that underpin the chiming Strokes-riff of "If That's The Case, Then I Don't Know". Best of all is the swooning "Woken By A Kiss", featuring the kind of dense, feedback-drenched loveliness that characterised what Brits called shoegazing and the Americans better termed dream-pop, drifting between drug-stupoured sleepiness and sudden thrusts of guitar.

A few songs towards the end slip from subtle into unmemorable, but for the most part "No Need To Be Downhearted" is a gorgeous record - big music full of small touches. It might sell only ten copies, but The Electric Soft Parade would still win the war of ambition most worth winning.

    by Jaime Gill