DELTA Hardlight CD (Dell'orso)

After a brief spell on Mercury, Delta have returned to their former label. When I heard Delta had signed to a major I thought it was good as they would get a chance to get their music out to a maximum audience, but on the other hand thought it too good to be true that a band I like would sign to a major and stay there. There are very few major label signed bands that grab my attention, and whenever I do hear bands on majors that I like, more often than not they get dropped. This isn't to say these bands are no good, as they are well-liked by specialist audiences - they are just not mainstream/fashionable enough for the public at large to latch on to them.

Hardlight was originally supposed to come out on Mercury; I'd heard they were going to release a follow-up single to Could You and then the album, but for months there was nothing. The band's (then) website, set up by Mercury, hadn't been updated in ages and was subsequently taken down. I then heard on the grapevine that another label would be releasing the album instead, but I was unable to find out any specific information. I began to wonder if it would ever surface at all, so imagine my surprise when I found out a definite release date for the album!

The album has a very well designed cover, based on a painting by Konstantin Yuon, and the music contained within generally follows in the style first heard on Slippin' Out, with its orchestral instrumentation and overall sophisticated and ambitious feel. Pump Action is an interesting mixture of traditional Spanish style music and an almost punkish sound. Head On starts off with an 'oompah' rhythm which led me to expect some sort of wacky comedy pop, but it's actually good! Ends with some jazzy brass - although they've used brass before they've never done anything that comes close to jazz before.

I never quite got why Delta were continually compared to country-rock bands in the past, but now they've actually made a song worthy of that comparison - Antique Bells. Survive is basically spacerock, the first time I've ever heard anything like this from Delta. Not What I'm Sayin' also hints at spacerock, and is dramatically different to the earlier version that appeared on the This City's Bigger... EP, which was a very raw home demo.

The only real problem I had with the previous album was the band's habit of resorting to slightly dubious lyrics on occasions. There's more of the same here in Happy Birthday Nik Nak (crazy title alert!) which has the line 'Happy birthday, woof meow', which sticks out like a sore thumb in a song with such an otherwise sophisticated atmosphere. Otherwise, this album is well worth a listen. Several of the tracks here show that Delta are starting to experiment more musically, and this is good to hear.

There's a website mentioned on the cover as www.sugared-up.com but oddly enough it doesn't (yet?) exist. Strange that they chose the name of their first single as the domain name, I'd have thought they'd have wanted to distance themselves from the early days - but obviously not! Hopefully the site will go up soon, it would be good to see the band get an official site at last (other than the short lived Mercury-run one).