For those of you old enough to remember, the year 2000 wasn’t exactly a vintage for music. Just like we were supposed to, we’d partied like it was the year before, then met up when fully grown, but the soundtrack for the new millennium hadn’t quite got itself together yet. Meanwhile though, in Dallas, Tim DeLaughter had a plan. Over the coming couple of years, while The Strokes arrived, while The Libertines crashed on board, and while guitars became the new hip-hop, up popped the peculiar, the multitudinous and the downright crackers Polyphonic Spree. 2002′s ‘The Beginning Stages Of…’ was a record like damn near no other at the time, full of joy, optimism, euphoria and a thousand wide-pupilled faces, grinning at you like goons. Without ever becoming a huge fan, I nevertheless remember exactly where I heard The Polyphonic Spree for the first time. So, anyway, I’m still very fond of them, and they’ve just stuck a new demo online and it’s amazing.

It’s all together too easy – and too common – for your average music nerd to write them off as shite and move on to the next doom-electro-funk-krautrock revival band. Maybe I’m just thick as mince but I genuinely can’t see a problem, musically, with a band that are an unfashionable cross between They Might Be Giants, The Flaming Lips and Songs Of Praise. The new demo just posted on their Fragile Army blog is particularly amazing because (as DeLaughter points out) it shows “how the songs usually start, in a demo process. Pretty stripped down”.

‘Pretty stripped down’… given the fact that the Spree make the line in the recording sand marked ‘preposterously overblown’ seem a dim and distant memory on most tracks, this is understatement to a biblical degree. This one’s just DeLaughter, some plucked guitar notes that expand into chords now and then, some reverb on his voice and er… that’s your lot. You know where it’ll end up, of course, all choral and triumphant and polyphonic but here… here, it sounds like a tragedy rescued, like a grim smile in the face of unimaginable sadness.

Best of all, there’s another one coming tomorrow.

It takes ages to load up, but listen up, heathens.