Reviewing records takes on a new dimension when you get to cover successive releases from the same band. I reviewed The Outline’s debut album back in 2008 (where does the time go?), and their new self-released offering Phantasmagoria shows a clear evolution of style, the sound of a band growing into themselves. But have they grown toward accessibility and mass-appeal, or away from it? Things begin with the lazy electronica groove of “Swinging Away”, a filtered bassline lazing around a lo-fi drum machine beat… and here come some twangy summer guitars to accompany the high-theatre vocals, like the better bits of Brandon Flowers mixed up with the fellow from We Are Scientists. This is a sunny-afternoon-in-June tune, I think, thoughtful, reflective. “There’s a curve coming, but the kids don’t want to change…” Well, yes. But that’s only news to the kids themselves, AMIRITE? But what do I know about what “the kids” know? As we continue inwards, “Back Section” suggests that the electronic percussion will be hanging around and sharing rhythm duties with a regular kit, accompanied by the mild guitars, some cheesy sci-fi synth patches and more of those knowingly overstated vocals compressed to telephone bandwidth. The songs here are more studied, more ironic and – as a whole – more captivating than those of You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It, with a slightly surreal cabaret edge to the narratives. I’m reminded of the Scissor Sisters, to be honest, though I find myself struggling to say exactly why that is. It’s camp, yeah, but not gay-bar stage-show camp, and there’s a hint of Beatles-ish psychedelia bubbling away in there somewhere… for example, closing stage-drama “Maurice and the Oracles of the Mathildean Forest” is, in a word, weird. But good weird, a kind of philosophical psychodrama dialogue with pop culture itself. Or something. What’s very obvious is that the eclectic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink attitude I picked up from You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It is just the way The Outline roll. Unafraid to try the unexpected, uninterested in treading the path of the moment, these guys aren’t easily pigeonholed… maybe that’s why they’re currently label-less? After all, one look at the charts suggests the labels only know how to sell more of the same as what’s already selling… … though in truth, I don’t think it’d take much more than some good exposure to get The Outline some more listeners. Sure, their material is a bit more left-field and fey than the bulk of the post-Killers stadium-indie crop, but the melodies are all there, as is the melancholic wrist-flapping drama. I don’t know how it works in the States, but indie rock over here has always been a very middle-class market, and there’s something of that teenage angst at play on Phantasmagoria, though none of the privileged whining of the haircut-hardcore lobby. What it lacks in rapidity and rock-out moments it more than makes up for in atmosphere and textural detail, a sharp contrast to the wham-bam aesthetics of their contemporaries, a scent of something fresh. There’s a curve coming, after all, but I think The Outline have seen it a long while before the kids. I hope for their sake that the kids catch up.