Two years on from Slow Club’s beautiful debut Yeah So, the Sheffield based folk-rock duo are back with their latest offering Paradise.  It’s a glorious record, and with such a short space of time between the two albums it’s remarkable how much the band’s sound has matured.

Right from the first track, and current single, 'Two Cousins', you can hear the brilliant production that sets this album immediately above its predecessor. A multitude of instruments, percussion, and vocals layer themselves perfectly to create a much fuller sound than anything Slow Club have had before.

While their first album was largely based around acoustic guitars and vocals, with any extra instrumentation feeling like an afterthought, Paradise sees Slow Club embrace the strings and percussion. 'Beginners', a stompy ‘60s inspired ballad, has a delightfully lively drum instrumental which carries the whole song.

It’s not just the arrangements that have developed so much since their last album; the vocals of the pair have also changed. The cute, in tandem singing that characterised Yeah So is restricted, and individually their voices have blossomed; Rebecca Taylor now full of sass and seduction, and Charles Watson all deep and powerful.
Paradise feels like the musical equivalent of that hideously clichéd teen movie scene where the bookish girl throws off her glasses and shakes out her hair to reveal some hidden sex goddess status. Lyrics previously about awkward fumbles and stolen glances seem to have come to fruition as Taylor swoons “You got the brain, I got the body”.

Slow Club cover a huge range of emotions in this record, from the wonderfully uplifting 'We’re Still Alive', to the angry defiance of lyrics “In a second I’ll be gone and you won’t have to think”.

When the album feels like it’s getting a bit too heavy, on the back of excellent but solemn tracks 'You, Earth or Ash' and 'Gold Mountain', it bursts back into life with rocky track 'The Dog'. Its delightful opening lyric “I used to think you were a boy/ You played the violin”, illustrating that beneath the added seriousness of this album lies a continuing playful side.

[4/5]