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The contrast between first and second albums couldn't be greater. For their debut record The Debt Collection, the Shortwave Set trio set up in a front room in Deptford, using old records and broken junk shop instruments rescued from Greenwich market, diverting them through a sampler where appropriate.
Fast forward three years or so and the band find themselves in the studio of Danger Mouse in Los Angeles, working on the follow up. In tow are John Cale and Van Dyke Parks. And yet the band's identity has remained, their musical textures still cut from the same cloth.
This time the sound is more upfront; there's a confidence in the musical statements they are making. There is also extra colour, courtesy of Parks' wonderful string arrangements, which add a depth to the music previously unexploited. Upbeat lyrics and beats trade hands, though the sense that something dark lurks just around the corner remains.
That is fully realised in Now 'Till 69, where a breezy opening of 'beebopaloola' backing vocals finds itself ultimately whacked on the head by an ominous piano stroke, dragging the track into the shadows. Yet even here the record's good spirits refuse to bow, and the following Distant Daze is softly reflective in a manner Sarah Cracknell would have approved.
Broadcast, too, lurk at the edges of this music, and come forward most noticeably through the entertaining Glitches 'n' Bugs. With Parks making many of the arrangements it's also inevitable that late Beatles work should be invoked, and it is - but the way he incorporates his work into the band's is the key to this album's success.
Replica, one of the album's choicest tracks, has a wonderful depth to its cellos and grandeur to its melody. No Social provides an uplifting unison chorus, subtly barbed with the lyric "because everyone knows that a dog dressed in clothes is still a dog", and inviting audience participation.
I Know makes the clearest possible reference to the band and their approach, the trio in an ode to self, proclaiming, "we'll make our music, always off key, it's twisted and it's wrong, some kind of junk symphony." Let's hope they carry on with that form of expression, as Replica Sun Machine has created an early blast of summer sunshine - playful, majestic, reflective and content, all in the same record.
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