Jonquil - 'Lions' (Try Harder) Released 26/05/08

Listen closely to ‘Lily’, the opening track on Jonquil’s second album, and in the background you can hear that the song’s foundation is not built on delicate instrumentation and a rising chorus of yearning mournful voices - although both these things are there, and throughout the majority of this delightful record - but the hiss of tape, background traffic and the sound of birds singing. This is significant because it forms a large part of Jonquil’s appeal, of creating rich folk-inflected music that deftly mixes the sustained, building structure of post-rock with all the lo-fi aesthetic and charm of bedroom recording. Though the budget compared to ‘Sunny Casinos’ was presumably bigger for ‘Lions’ (the scope certainly is), these incidental noises deliberately reference Jonquil’s earlier work, indicating that whilst their sound has markedly progressed, their ethos certainly hasn’t.

So whereas their debut album maintained its roots in largely wordless folk touched with elements of electronica, ‘Lions’, especially on the first half of the record, is relatively grander. The quietly insistent repetition of “follow me” on ‘Lily’ gives way to ‘Sudden Sun’. The picking of the guitar is infused with such warmth here that what on first listen appears stripped and campfire friendly unexpectedly turns into a recording with a structure and approach to layering that wouldn’t shame Four Tet. ‘Pencil, Paper’, though less dynamic in approach, does subtly use what sounds like a flugelhorn – thank you press release – to maintain the melancholy.

But it’s ‘Babe, So Now Why No?’ that highlights the album’s standout moments, which is in creating this grand sense of the communal with a canvas that isn’t always suited to such a direction; the choir of voices featured on ‘Babe..’, are also used to great effect on the title track. Jonquil have hit a wonderful balance between home-spun intimacy and a collective – Animal or otherwise – feeling of belonging to their little world. The Elbow-esque skeletal drums underpinning ‘Babe..’ do little harm either.

The thunderstorm-assisted ‘Here’s To The Little Man’ and acoustic ode to forgotten love ‘I Don’t Need Advice’ neatly bookend a considered second half. Stately in pace yet grand in design, the strings on ‘Subtle Strains’ and understated 60s pop of ‘Whistle Low’ are particular highlights here, but by then – the largely superfluous accordian-driven instrumental ‘Shore’ aside – the idea that ‘Lions’ is more than a progressive second album, that here is a record to stand proudly against comparative recent work from the likes of Beirut and Youthmovies (whose vocalist Andrew Mears has worked on this album) is assured.