The Optimist - the difficult second album...

I've wondered about this for a long while and the wait turned out to be longer than perhaps anyone intended, as circumstances conspired to make it more difficult than perhaps it might have been.

The thing is that I still love 'Fantastic Playroom' as it has so many memories for me too [see here] and I thought that, without reason and not for lack of talent, its successor could fail to live up to the expectations that I would have of it.

Many circumstances mean that the exuberant pop, and sometimes nu-trance influenced sound of 2007, probably wasn't going to work quite so well in 2010 and for more than a few reasons; not all of them down to the music-buying public.

First single 'Chaos' is just about sufficiently familiar and comforting to remind why NYPC were so impressive the first time out. If you want my reference points on 'Fantastic Playroom' it reminds me slightly of 'The Get Go' or, perhaps more so, 'Talking, Talking', which was the most soul-searching song on the first album.
The bulk of the second album is however more uniformly reflective but also very accomplished in its repositioned mood - and the title mirrors this sentiment - without becoming either maudlin or self-indulgent.

Catching the zeitgeist once may have been just good fortune; to do it twice takes time and patience.