Delays - Everything's The Rush

by Tom Mendelsohn

Some of it's the rush, at any rate

"Lead single 'Hooray' sounds like a cloudburst in a Skittles advert, but seems to be about debilitating OCD, for instance. Nevertheless, it seems to fit."

Delays’ third album, 'Everything’s The Rush', sees the band go the same way as many of their early 00s contemporaries; with a messy label divorce and a re-evaluation of priorities under their belts, they seem to be starting anew - older, wiser and spiritually refreshed.

That they are; you can hear it in the music. Not that, as a band, they were ever particularly jaded – they've always sounded a little like a more irrepressible, less complex Cocteau Twins – sort of – but they are starrier-eyed than ever on this record, producing joyous, celebratory endorphine-rushes of songs. There's a lot to like, basically. Some of the subject matter is not entirely congruent with the music; lead single 'Hooray' sounds like a cloudburst in a Skittles advert, but seems to be about debilitating OCD, for instance. Nevertheless, it seems to fit.

The album does, however, suffer from the same malaise of all Delays' albums everywhere - three or four very strong tracks totally eclipsing all the other songs surrounding them on the album. While this means that any potential Delays best of will be top balls, it’s a situation which tends to impinge on the enjoyment of individual LPs.

‘Everything’s The Rush’ allows songs all too easily to lose their ways in a thicket of over-ambitious instrumentation and vocal trilling. It would be obvious that Greg Gilbert has a special voice even without his insisting on lathering every song to a froth of indulgent trilling. He loses a lot of the power he might otherwise have had, had he been more judicious.

This criticism goes for the whole band, really. If they’d chosen to be a little less maximalist, their songs would have been able to breathe and everything would profit. The clutter problem matters less on the bigger numbers, so you get the impression that maybe Delays are so given to orchestral embellishment in order to mask their weaker songs.

Caveats aside, this is still a proficient album, full of the wide-eyed wonderment and expansive melody which typifies the band and sets them aside from their less ambitious fellows. No matter what genre scholars try and tell you, Delays are not Athlete. They are an intermittently glorious band with big ideas who, hopefully, one day, will produce a masterpiece.
fletchy fletch fletch said on May 2nd 2008 [report abuse]

What in God's name have you done with Tom Mendelsohn you sickeningly enthusiastic imposter? Come on now, this has been going on for days. That's enough.

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