From Stylus
Nick Southall Wrote:
The sound is exquisite, futuristic and clean, melding enormous synthetic keyboard hooks with mellifluous guitar and ethereal vocals.
t’s some kind of synthesis of strange, sci-fi beauty and dancefloor excitement. “You and Me” may begin with a slightly dodgy a cappella vocal (not dodgy in that it fails to hit notes, dodgy in that it sounds like showing off) but once the enormous, swoonsome synth sweeps across the song, followed by a delicious bass groove, it catches you up and pulls you in. Ever since, well, “Fools Gold,” indie bands have tried to catch that dance thing, first by adding a tiresome funky drummer fill and latterly by- sod it, you’ve heard Franz Ferdinand, you know what they do. Prodigy went backwards and added guitars to beats, seeing the connection between rave and punk energy. Delays see the potential of dance music as the last great bastion of psychedelia, and work accordingly. That was what got me about the likes of Aphex Twin and Orbital a decade ago—not that they made me dance, that they made me deliriously woozy.
Some of the sonic twists and turns that Delays pull on You See Colours—the multi-tracked vocals, the airy guitars, the pulsing synths—are jaw-dropping. It’s like synaesthesia in that it ties things together that aren’t together normally, and makes it seem natural. And what’s more, makes it seem like everyone else should feel and do the same too. Why wouldn’t any band add a disco beat, a funky bassline and a head-spinning synth-string riff to a guitar-based song? “Valentine” pulls the same trick as the opener but in yet more directions, making for a stunning opening one-two punch (the jab sends you reeling, the right-hook knocks you out). Only a few of the other tunes quite match up to that (“Sink Like A Stone,” “Out Of Nowhere,” and the beautiful piano-led closer “Waste Of Space”), but the album is so concise (11 songs in 40 minutes) and so aesthetically, sonically beautiful that the songwriting and melodic shortcomings (I can’t hum anything off here after a dozen listens, but I don't care) matter little. You See Colours sends me reeling for repeat with a smile on my face.