FORMAT: CD

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LUCKY SOUL are the most exciting thing to come out of Greenwich since time itself. The Great Unwanted is their long-awaited debut album.

The six-piece have released two singles previously: 'My Brittle Heart’ and 'Lips are Unhappy', out in March and June 2006, seemed incapable of inspiring anything but huge heartfelt superlative outpourings, whether in the press ("melodies as colossal, memorable and irresistible as a stampede of elephants bearing down on your tent" – The Guardian), on the radio ("we've never received so many emails - back off!" – Nemone, BBC 6 Music), on the blogs ("I personally am going to carry it around with me everywhere I go, and every now and then sneak a peek to check it wasn’t all some kind of fantastical dream") or from your cabbie ("I like this - it's proper music"). Phil Spector, Dusty Springfield, THE CONCRETES, Stax, THE RONETTES, Brian Wilson, Sticky Fingers: these are some of the reference points being thrown around.

Any one of the songs on The Great Unwanted feels like in another, fairer world it could be a number one single. ‘Add Your Light to Mine, Baby’ opens it all with a two and a half minute funstorm of 60s pop: simple hooks, shimmering harmonies and cock-a-hoop party horns. ‘Lips are Unhappy’ is a thing of vintage goodness with a perfect stop-start melody that will have even the most chuggy of Wurlitzers whooping back to life. ‘Ain’t Never Been Cool’, lead track from the EP out Jan 2007, is all raucous handclaps, wondrous horn arrangements and rock & roll guitars. It soars from gorgeous hook to knock out left-hook til it all reaches a big crashing epiphany of unbridled harmony-soaked joy. (Trivia: the handclaps are from actual LUCKY SOUL fans found via their online messageboard).

But beneath all this is an odd lyrical melancholy: “I’ve seen you dancing like no one was looking / Beneath the fullest moon,” sings Ali amid the exuberance of ‘Add Your Light to Mine, Baby’. “Some day soon / I’m going to find all the things I’ve been yearning for”. From the glorious grey-skied ‘One Kiss Don’t Make a Summer’ with its “pride that stops the aching inside showing through”, and the “carrion crows” who “argue envy is a virtue” in the twisting, almost Lynch-esque 50s epic ‘Struck Dumb’, to the “burned out head on a broken matchstick” of ‘My Darling, Anything’, you find yourself asking: ‘is it a sad song or a happy song?’. These are love songs, it’s true – but they speak as much of insecurity as of euphoria, of a heady vertigo that is resigned to an eventual fall. ‘Baby I’m Broke’ is a mascara-streaked classic that slowly burns to a bitter incandescence. ‘It’s Yours’ will be the soundtrack to a thousand tired heads on a thousand taxicab windows. The album’s centerpiece is ‘The Great Unwanted’. Like some wayward lovechild of Dusty Springfield and THE ARCADE FIRE, it builds from a nonchalant string movement to a tremendous, melodramatic crescendo and a promise that “we will not be ignored”.

LUCKY SOUL are fronted by the beautiful Ali Howard whose voice, with its interplay of fragility and power, brings to mind Sandie Shaw, MAZZY STAR’s Hope Sandoval and THE RONETTES’ Veronica Bennett. But it is guitarist and songwriter Andrew Laidlaw’s persistent faith in his art – and his ear for a direct, irresistible melody – that is winning them a growing army of admirers (THE RAVEONETTES’ Sune Rose Wagner amongst them). In 2002, Andrew was based in Glasgow, working nights as a supervisor in a sound engineering college. When no-one else was around he’d use the space to develop what would become central to the timeless and starry-eyed LUCKY SOUL sound, staying up for days on end writing songs, perfecting them – or rejecting them. He started working with drummer Nathaniel Perkins, got a new job (dishing out those 99 Flakes at a family-run ice cream shop) and began what was to be a 2-year period of incubation, performing and rehearsing his compositions with a prototype of today’s band.

“It’s soul music by small town dreamers who don’t pretend to come from the Deep South,” he says. “Beautiful and self-effacing, bittersweet. Like romance, it seems superficial but runs deep. It doesn’t try to be clever: your guts aren’t clever.”

It was towards the end of 2004 that LUCKY SOUL began to come together in its final form. With Nathaniel and Andrew now ensconced in the capital, young guitarist Ivor Sims was recruited after Andrew witnessed him cutting deftly through the middle-aged “hell” at a blues jam at the Spice of Life pub in Soho. Then, in a dramatic twist worthy of LUCKY SOUL: the Unofficial Biography, the original singer and bassist fell in love, had a child together and ran away. After four months of searching far and wide without success, a replacement bassist was found in the form of serial Brighton mod turned nurse Toby Fogell. Meanwhile Ali Howard, who has since been described by the Guardian as “evocative of arch divas from all points Dusty Springfield to Nina Persson” was discovered in the pop psychology department of a well-known bookshop and made a perfect fit as the frontwoman shortly afterwards, with keyboardist Malcolm Young being brought on board in 2006, firstly just for the live shows, then as a full member of the band when they realised that was exactly what he’d become.

So that’s LUCKY SOUL. They’re the soundtrack to a pointless crush, or what comforts you as you wave goodbye through the train window on the 14.36 from Stockport to Euston. They’re the thing that gives you the guts to go and ask someone you’ve never seen before for a phone number, then shrug and get on with life if coldly rebuffed. In the words of cult music site Audiojunkies “I love you, LUCKY SOUL!” Or perhaps Paul Connolly expressed things best in his recent (five star) live review: “go make LUCKY SOUL stars”.