The Delgados: Hate

For 2000's The Great Eastern, The Delgados turned for the first time to neo-prog producer Dave Fridmann, who added twinkle and fairy dust to the group's acerbic folk-pop, just as he has for The Flaming Lips, Wheat, Elf Power, and his home band, Mercury Rev. Fridmann returns for The Delgados' latest, Hate, which is filled with his specialty: songs that are at once chiming, ethereal, and deceptively languid, with every line sounding agonized-over and enhanced. On the thesis song "All You Need Is Hate," singer-guitarist Alun Woodward harmonizes with The Delgados' co-founder, singer-guitarist Emma Pollock, as they rip lines from old love songs, replacing "love" with "hate." ("Hate is all around," "hate is in the air," "everlasting hate," and so on.) Beginning with a fine-spun lattice of piano, bells, strings, and synths, the song teases with a booming kettle drum midway through the first verse, then explodes in the chorus with ear-busting, echoing drums and curlicues of slide guitar. "All You Need Is Hate" develops into a sort of anti-anthem, as the strings escalate into a sweeping rush, and that's one of The Delgados' more conventionally structured songs. More typical is the singsong coda of "Woke From Dreaming," or the plaintive, scene-setting introduction to the stormy "The Drowning Years," both of which show the band building their stories of cracked lives into miniature playlets. The nearly seven-minute "Child Killers" repeats a handful of lines about life in a dead-end town, but the backing music progresses from gentle lullaby to funereal hymn to cresting symphony to dreamy trip-hop experiment. Sometimes the group's incessant fussiness can be oppressive, as on the album opener, "The Light Before We Land," in which strings and a choir compete with distorted percussion, and a new vocal treatment or arrangement seems to pop up on nearly every verse. But that's part of The Delgados' plan to keep listeners off-guard, and even assault them a little. It hearkens back to the glory days of rock as theater, when bands weren't afraid to reach, or squeeze.