Advice for bands undergoing difficult second album syndrome: split at the demo stage, finish the damn thing anyway, and promptly reform upon completion. Thus the ensemble circumvents any sense of taking the music for granted, sharpens the songs with a sense of now-is-all-we-have, and prevents the gang mentality from ossifying into a civil service ethos.
Such is the lesson we might glean from Delorentos’ You Can Make Sound, recorded as a swansong for the faithful when the band hit their doldrums last winter, and were then coerced into bringing it to term by engineer Gareth Mannix. You wouldn’t know it from the sound of the record, a supremely assured set that manages to seem expansive and open-aired without ever resorting to stadium gestures, no matter how much songs like ‘Editorial’ and ‘Leave Me Alone’ might inspire the listener to don crombie and scarf and stand on a clifftop looking windswept and interesting.
Much of the band’s magnetism (charm is too lightweight a word) is due to Rónan Yourell’s plaintive vocals the surging ‘Sanctuary’, plus the Cure-like focus and economy of songs like ‘S.E.C.R.E.T’ (lethally catchy, hooks all over the shop, not a note wasted), and an overall exuberance that belies the circumstances of recording.
It’s also one of those increasingly rare collections that utilises digital perks while still sounding like it was made by four people inhabiting the same postal code. Even when the band’s collective skin is a little too transparent and their songcraft porous (‘Hallucinations’ is pitched halfway between Franz and Bloc Party), brio gets the tunes through. As for the rousing closing suite of ‘Let the Light Go Out’, the title tune and the Rufus-like last-song-we’ll-ever-sing piano elegy ‘I Remember’, well, it fair stirs the heart.
Glad the brothers worked it out.