Following up a successful debut is tough. For one thing, people are paying attention now. Most debuts are recorded in obscurity, and that condition tends to benefit the enterprise. You can usually tell when you’re listening to a group’s first album, can’t you? It’s not their strongest necessarily, but it’s vibrant and playful in a way its successors rarely are — in large part because those qualities are hard to recapture once people take notice of a band and develop expectations around their work. Anonymity means freedom, and with album #2, that luxury is gone. You have eyes on you now, and the observer effect has a long history of working to artists’ detriment.
Courtesy of band
Many a band has wilted under the pressure. Allo Darlin’, fortunately, is not one of these bands. The London-based four piece first gained notoriety in 2010 with the release of their self-titled debut. Sweet, moving, and immediate, the LP was lauded in the music press as an inspired wake-up call for the tired tween pop scene. And, given its loose, effortless, ukulele-heavy vibe, it’s no surprise to learn from the band that the album “was made in a very carefree way in a short space of time.”
Like many groups before them in their position, rather than try to recapture the spur-of-the-moment playfulness of their debut, Allo Darlin’ took a careful, measured approach to the recording of their second record. Europe, released this April on Slumberland, largely abandons the ukuleles and mandolins of the debut in favor of more challenging, complex instrumentation.
“This time, we were more aware that we’re making something that people would actually hear, so we spent longer putting it together, trying different sounds and speeds and all that stuff. The songs come from a different place, they’re not as immediate and reveal their charms with repeated listens,” the band explains.
Groups often take this tack with the recording of album number two. But that doesn’t make it a safe choice. Fellow dream poppers Best Coast followed their loose and disarming self-titled 2010 debut with a more polished and mature sophomore effort in 2012 as well, leading to a parade of reviews wondering why a band would abandon the very qualities that helped win them accolades in the first place. It’s the catch-22 of the follow-up album. You stay the course and repeat the formula of your debut, you risk accusations of artistic stasis. Shake things up and try to develop your sound, suddenly you’re too ambitious, or maybe you don’t understand your own appeal.
The secret reality, of course, is that it doesn’t really matter which path you choose. Sure, preference will always be granted to bands that push themselves creatively. But at the end of the day, an album is good if its songs are good. The rest just give music critics something to hang their hat on.
Fortunately for Allo Darlin’, they got both parts right. Indeed, the band navigated the follow-up album minefield about as nimbly as one possibly can. Crucially, the development in sound on Europe never feels obligatory or forced (as it does on some other sophomore releases); the songwriting grew and deepened in a way that it makes the evolution in instrumentation feel warranted, necessary even. Predictably, the music press is near-unanimous in its praise for Europe.
One element that fortunately carried over from the debut is lead vocalist Elizabeth Morris’ lyrical skill. The characters in Morris’ songs have an endearing habit of making nodding reference to other bands and songs (in “Kiss Your Lips,” off the self-titled, the narrator actually breaks out into the chorus of Weezer’s “El Scorcho” in the middle of the song) in the middle of otherwise first-person accounts of past loves and friendships; as Morris observes on album closer “My Sweet Friend”, “a record is not just a record/ records can hold memories” — a sentiment which, as Rolling Stone noted in its enthusiastic review, is more or less Europe’s thesis.
“The best thing about music is that it can be an intensely personal experience as well as a communal one,” the band observes.
That communal quality is an important element of Allo Darlin’s appeal. The many allusions give one the sense (true or not) that the group’s music was made for and by music obsessives, and, should you qualify for that designation (as many of their fans likely do), the experience of listening to the album will feel even more warm and inclusive than it already does. Europe benefits as well from improvements in the lyrics’ delivery system: the band notes that Morris’ voice “changed and got stronger after playing shows for a year” a pleasant and immediately noticeable difference between this album and the self-titled.
Allo Darlin’ is planning a tour of the UK in September, followed by stops in Australia, Spain, and “the bits of Europe [they’ve] missed.” Another single is due out in the fall, by which point the band intends to have begun the writing of the third album. Yeah, that’s the thing with successful follow-up records — eventually, you have to follow those up too.
Fortunately, Allo Darlin’ looks to be up to the job.
by Tadhg Ferry
