Airy Exuberance. Simian Ghost, Youth.

Much in the same way that sweet, sweet fellow Swedes The Radio Dept. are innately inextricable from frontman Johan Duncanson, so too are Simian Ghost from their throbbing heart: the melody-hounding mind of Sebastian Arnström. In banishing the more languid and, arguably, consequently lethargic routines of 2010 debut Infinite Traffic Everywhere Arnström may bound gayly toward sugared mellifluousness and blithe tunage in search of pop-girded recognition within a popular culture long-since slaughtered brutally by David Guetta or Will.I.Am or Logic or (a lack of human) logic.

Arnström's scrounging as such yields a knapsack's worth of exclusively upbeat jollity, each track akin to an icicle of sunlight capable of tearing a gash in the brain in order that it slip in and shack up in that remote lobe where every indelible hook from Where Damage Isn't Already Done, or Gimme Gimme Gimme, or I Follow Rivers intelligently resides. Just beyond the reach of scratch, Youth's sensationally aestival title track smoulders delightfully and as Arnström soothes: "I feel myself drifting off with you", wherever it is he's wafting away to you feel as though you're already there. The subtly nuanced harmonised sighs that simmer beneath the plinky arpeggios of recent single Wolf Girl meanwhile perforate not merely impressions of the track itself but of Youth as an irradiate whole, akin to a lightbulb initially opaquely and later incandescently gleaming through pristine A4 as it gradually, gloriously melts beyond obstruction.

The bass-led cosmic bubbling of Siren recalls The Flaming Lips were a wide-eyed Chris Taylor entrapped in Wayne Coyne's pellucid blob whilst intriguingly discombobulating closer No Dreams, its lyrics of snowfall and wintry trudge, adds flecks of gelidity to an effort that's otherwise as warm and cleansing as the hottest toddy. However in such clammy warmth is diffused an underlying tepidity, a slight mawkishness that spasmodically threatens to suffocate what is often a profound sentimentality: Sparrow pertains to the cloying acoustic simplicity of early Turin Breaks records (good); the Sonic Youth scrawl of Crystalline Lovers Mind is spicked, spanned, and consequently spanked by the irksomely jaunty elation of Two Door Cinema Club (bad); and the far from cryptically entitled Fenix hears Arnström's voice unashamedly assimilating the floaty, sexless soughing of Thomas Mars to again pestilential effect (ugly). For although Simian Ghost nonchalantly recline in similar timeframes and mood swings to their Gallic counterparts, and even if imitation may represent the sincerest form of flattery it here deflates an otherwise well-rounded full-length.