Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 05/05/08
Label: Fiction

Like physical beauty, great pop is at its best when it seems effortless. You can toil over a song for months, tweaking sound and structure, toying with melody, but if any of this effort is obvious the listener feels oddly deflated. Delays surely know this, pop connoisseurs that they are, and have pulled the trick off twice, with their astonishingly lovely, painfully overlooked early singles "Nearer Than Heaven" and "Long Time Coming". So it's genuinely sad to note that "Everything's The Rush" sounds a little too much like hard work.

Some of this may be the result of a crisis in confidence. After the middling success of their indie textured debut, their second album embraced a sleek, shiny pop sound which owed as much to Giorgio Moroder and Prince as it did to The Las and Beatles. It tanked. On this, their third and probably final chance, the band have rushed back to the guitars and multi-tracked harmonies that first made their name. From the moment opener "Girl's On Fire" chugs into view on epic U2 chords until the harmony pile-up that closes the lovely, sunshine-soaked "The Earth Gave You To Me", this is a record that sounds anxious to please.

The other culprit is Youth's overbearing production. Practically every track comes complete with a distracting and tricksy intro, while the over indulgence in strings is incredible, even by his standards. More is more seems to be his only sonic principle, nowhere more so than on the album's big ballad, "Pieces". Somewhere inside this bloated concoction is a truly beautiful, frail wonder screaming to be let out, but it's buried under an avalanche of strings and souped up percussion. And while "Silence" may be a slightly bland song, it isn't enlivened by the philharmonic that's trucked in at the one minute mark.

Why does this all matter so much? Because Delays are one of only a paltry handful of British guitar bands to truly love pop melody, and to have musical horizons that stretch beyond the tired Stones, Kinks and Fab Four canon. Just hear the radiant chorus that underpins the luscious "Love Made Visible", or feel the breezy energy that ripples through "Hooray". Even a song as slight as "No More Lie Ins", with its milkman melody and lolloping rhythm, is brightened up by the directness of the songwriting and some sumptuous harmonies.

Hopefully "Everything's The Rush" will secure the success it is so clearly designed for, as that might give this most underrated of bands a chance to finally record the great album they are surely capable of but are yet to deliver.

    by Jaime Gill