The Polyphonic Spree; Swim Deep – review

The hype fairy is, if nothing else, capricious. She sprinkles dust on bands and then departs, most often never to return. Although there are companies out there devoted to predictive youth marketing, her whims are still pretty hard to forecast. The wreckage left after her departure is the stuff of nightmares. Toppled egos, schadenfreude and, if you are lucky, one-hit wonder status.

Right now, Swim Deep, a four-piece guitar band from Birmingham, are enjoying the benefits of a waft of her favour. At the time of writing, their debut album, Where the Heaven Are We, is at No 3 in the midweek album charts. That's not entirely shabby for a greenhorn British guitar band, even in the wilds of August.

Some of this sparkle is secondhand, since Birmingham's nouveau indie rock scene has threatened to go national for some time now. These B-Town bands – the slightly better-known Peace, the slightly less well-known Troumaca, Jaws et al – might appear a discreetly niche concern outside the environs of NME. Crucially, though, no NME writer actually had to invent them. Swim Deep are quite real; at least one of their girlfriends is in the audience and the band's hair – blond, brunette, curly, straight – is all cut just so it strafes their cheekbones when they blithely wag their heads.

At this early evening in-store marking the release of Where the Heaven Are We, bassist Cavan McCarthy wears the kind of charity shop lamé shirt that Suede's Brett Anderson might once have hankered after. Much else here is also secondhand. Swim Deep's jangle is a composite mush of every lackadaisically consumptive guitar act who eulogise daydreaming and girls (King City explicitly lusts after Jenny Lee Lindberg from Warpaint). The Sea, Swim Deep's most immediate song, brings to mind the first incarnation of Primal Scream in which a very young Bobby Gillespie wore paisley.

"I reckon we've got the best band in the world," offers singer Austin Williams. They really don't, although the queue to get CDs signed suggests Swim Deep might just punch above their weight. Their melodies are sure-footed and their mellow variety of yearning is indie rock's deathless trope-in-chief.

As Swim Deep may discover, the hype fairy's inconstancy doesn't have to be a tragedy. There are those who outfox her. Texan happy mob the Polyphonic Spree had their fairy dust moment just over 10 years ago, when the 20+-strong outfit landed on David Bowie's Meltdown bill in 2002 and blew the UK wide open with their gown-wearing orchestral pop. Since then they've been artistically superseded, first by Sufjan Stevens and his more mystical marching bands, and, later, Arcade Fire. The Flaming Lips have always sounded far more troubled than the Spree and have been all the more engaging for it.

But Tim DeLaughter's sense of uplift is indomitable. After a long lull in which the Spree leader started another band (Preteen Zenith), made some music for high-end baby visuals DVDs (Wee See), released a Christmas album and took to hand-pressing vinyl at his Good Records label-cum-shop, the band's fourth album, Yes, It's True, was crowd-funded by Kickstarter. It exceeded the $100,000 donations requested. Hardly megabucks, but enough to be going on with.

Tonight's sold-out show is their first London gig for six years, and it begins with typical showmanship: a white sheet is spread between two scaffolding poles, on to which DeLaughter, stage-side, sprays WE ARE FRIENDS! and then cuts it open.

Although this 14-strong line-up retains the grinning exuberance of previous Sprees, some things have changed, not least their gear: psychedelic tunics (boys) and sexy white Alpine fräulein dresses (girls).

The new songs are heralded by a change of lightshow: multicoloured floaters, writ large. Unlike most of the Spree's older songs, these are less of a whimsical galumph on the 60s–70s cusp, but dance tunes. On Popular By Design and You Don't Know Me, electronics loom as large as brass and strings. It's two steps forwards and one step back though. Curiously, a delirious cover of Nirvana's Lithium has become the Spree's set-closer (the track dates to their Fragile Army album of 2007). Good as it is, it's still another band's song.

The oldest songs are the most smiley, with Soldier Girl sounding particularly nostalgic. But even more gladdening is the way the Spree defy the hype curse. Touring with a huge head count defeated their previous labels, according to an article in Billboard; DeLaughter has apparently put $96,000 on his credit card to get the Spree around four summer festivals. And yet with buzz a distant memory they somehow continue to cook up their own fairy dust substitute and deliver a little dogged joy.