As the temperature begins to fall, does the English pop music need to be whipped? That is what The Electric Soft Parade from Brighton seem to believe. On their new record, the band keeps on showing that mixing hot and cold does not always make lukewarm. Even if it gets close to a scottish shower. Obviously, the first listening can be a disaster. But don’t be mistaken. The opening song is a perfect example: “Things I’ve done before” has a slide guitar sound on the introduction, you can easily imagine yourself in a pub, drinking a pint of Lager with the Gallagher brothers, beating the tempo... and no sooner than the chorus, you’ll find yourself with Paul McCartney picking up red poppies. OK, doing the splits is somehow puzzling, misleading and many will give up. But one must not forget how difficult an exercise it is. Here it is more than successful and there are many other surprises to come. Alex and Tom White, the nucleus of ESP, do not hesitate to thrust Rocky Racoon from the White album in the new century, it is called “The Wrongest Thing in Town”. This achievement is even more impressive and disturbing when you know that the record was partly made in Abbey Road, thanks to BMG’s money. We used to think that only Blur, Radiohead and Supergrass were able to do something new with something old without turning into heartless rip-off. Needless on a closer examination, everyone knows now that ESP is a band that is going to be important and that 2004 is going to be their year of glory. The only imperfection of The American Adventure is its duration, barely more than half an hour. Still, originality and brilliantness can’t be measured in kilos. Records like this one are precious: so simple and so humble – the artwork is just a drawing by Tom - that at first sight you cannot see how rich they are, full of tunes (it is some kind of pun impossible to translate, in the article, the writer plays with the similar sound of the English word tune, and the French one “thune” that means “money” in slang) In this second Electric Soft Parade record, there is such a diversity in the writing, arrangements, choice of the sounds and in the playing that it instantly becomes a very solid record. So solid that it gets peculiar. Usually the second record is always the difficult second record. Quick, let’s give the first one another try, for sure we missed something. 4/5 Vincent Palmer, Rock’n’folk December 2003, translation theghostchild