We thought we had Soft Hearted Scientists pegged you know. The band's last album, Uncanny Tales From The Everyday Undergrowth was a diverting listen bogged down by useless production and self-conscious dope-addled wackiness.
So it was reasonable for us to assume that Take Time To Wonder In A Whirling World would be more of the same. Not in the slightest, though – for Take Time To Wonder In A Whirling World, Soft Hearted Scientists have reigned in some of their more tiresomely studentish instincts and come up with an ambitious, spaced-out collection of songs that put them in line for the title of the British Flaming Lips.
Common consensus says that new bands are so focused on making a statement of intent with their debut that they often come up dry second time around, but the opposite seems to be true as far as Soft Hearted Scientists are concerned. Their first album was full of overlong sea shanties and rambling anecdotes about siblings in Japan and Billy Ray Cyrus but, now that that's all out of their systems, it's left Soft Hearted Scientists free to create gorgeous crystalline nuggets like Take Time To Wonder In A Whirling World.
Take Time To Wonder In A Whirling World smacks of folky restraint and mature ambition. Hardly skin-blistering punk rock, but then neither was Brian Wilson so shut up. Much of this could be down to the production – for the first time Soft Hearted Scientists have achieved a sound that's more than the sum of its parts – but it could equally have something to do with all the maddeningly catchy tunes on offer.
Make no mistake, these are songs your milkman could whistle – and if you're not humming along to the wistful, hypnotic Siberia by the middle of your first listen then you haven't been paying attention close enough. Similarly, I Wanted You taps into a vein of melody that's so instantly memorable you can't help but be staggered that nobody has come up with it before.
Elsewhere on Take Time To Wonder In A Whirling World, Soft Hearted Scientists manage to turn a simple chant of the album's title into Rockford's Return, a (comparatively) funked-out delight presumably named because it sounds like the theme-tune to The Rockford Files. Throw in shamelessly sentimental closer Drops In The Ocean, based around the line "We may all be drops in the ocean but the ocean is just a collection of drops" and you've got the makings of an album built to last.
Take Time To Wonder In A Whirling World is by no means perfect, of course – I'll Be Happy, I'll Be Sleeping manages to try and get away with the line "The 17th century would have been for me a catastrophe/ If I hadn't been burnt as a warlock I no doubt would have succumbed to primitive dentistry" while Soft Hearted Scientists still betray their love for The Beta Band a little too keenly on The Caterpillar Song, but neither of these examples are a disaster – idiosyncratic lyrics were never a problem for, say, Pavement, while the fact that The Caterpillar Song builds until its final four minutes become a furious Melody Nelson wig-out is enough for us to forgive the band of anything.
It'd take a miracle for it to bother the charts, but on the basis of Take Time To Wonder In A Whirling World, Super Furry Animals had better come up with something really special for their next album, or they'll risk losing all their fans to Soft Hearted Scientists.