When the lead singer of a band describes his new album as sounding "like the earth giving birth", he's setting himself a monumental task just to get it heard above the cacophony of knives being whetted and put-downs being honed. Perhaps for this reason alone, it's a supreme pleasure any time said album totally lives up to the pre-release claims. Recently a lot of my friends have been wondering why I'm smiling so much.

Kicking off with the towering "A Long Day Continues/We Sound Amazed" and then diving headlong into the oceanic "Hold Me Now", it's clear that Tim DeLaughter's devotion to big-music-with-trumpets is every bit as zealous as before. In a step on from "The Beginning Stages Of..." there are fewer instrumental interludes posing as tracks here, nearly every nook and cranny of the album being crammed to the gills with real songs with choruses and stuff. The first four tracks are a barrage of anthem after anthem after anthem, and when "Two Thousand Places" leaves you wondering how much higher they could fly, they hop deftly back down and treat us to the more intimate whimsy of "One Man Show" and the McCartney-esque "Everything Starts At the Seam". Of course, they were holding back their trump card for the finale, with the monumental "When The Fool Becomes The King", a Lennon-shagging epic in God knows how many movements featuring the lyric "with this crucifix, yeah you're shaking it, but you think to yourself, everything will be fine" and an awesome outro harking back to earlier classic "It's The Sun".

A result then, conveniently released just in time for summer, and with three poppy bonus tracks including the particularly lovely "Working Out The Kinks" (it sounds like The Kinks, geddit?) it just leaves the hippy in me wondering how much better a place the world would be if Messrs. Bush, Bin Laden and Sharon would just let themselves be born again. The new church cometh, sign up here. -Ian Martin, July.10.04

Together We're Heavy