This fairly speedy follow-up to the London quintet’s Mercury-nominated debut album Prelude to Ecstasy of flamboyant, theatrical, baroque and art-rock-pop, continues in a similar rich, elaborate vein, with another strong set of swaggering numbers with influences from Abba to Kate Bush, Sparks, Lee Hazlewood to Leonard Cohen, with a sprinkling of darker undercurrents and deathly themes. The folk-operaticand rock panache of Second Best certainly has some Kate Bush as well as Sparks flying off it, while This Is The Killer Speaking, once in full swing, has a classic ABBA Does Your Mother Know? rising bassline on the chorus. Again they tick all the boxes of their stylish, theatrical, curtain-swishing ambitions. Perhaps some of the songs are a little too layered and dramatic at the expense of melody, but nevertheless they remain an impressive outfit, filled with swirling, rising vocal harmonies and extravagant rock flourishes the songs credited to all five members of the band and sometimes touring drummer Casper Miles. Other highlights include the shimmering, violin-flecked The Scythe, or the more stripped back piano number I Hold Your Anger, a first-person maternal instinct, but with a darkly humorous image (“I don’t know if I’d be a good mother / I dreamt that you cut off your arm / And I blame myself, I should have told you to be careful / I don’t want to be the one / To tell you that it won’t grow back … I hold your sorrows, hold your fears / Hold your anger in my tears / Nobody asked me to / But that is what I’m meant to do”). There’s experimental passages too, such the unusual a cappella opening of spooky country-folk of Woman Is The Tree, while second track Count The Ways moves between soaring musical and orchestral passages, and some echoes of the crooner phase that Arctic Monkeys have explored. Final track Inferno, referencing Joan of Arc, brings the melodrama to the close in full rock panache. As Brian May humorously once said, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing” and the band have no fear of going full on out. Most entertaining. Out on Island Records.
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