And while Embrace does write great toe-tapping, get-off-your-ass and-dance rock songs like "All Your Good Good People" and "One Big Family", their true strength seems to be when they turn down the dial on the guitar a notch and let their horns and strings take a vital role in the song. Tracks like "Higher Sights" and "My Weakness Is None of Your Business" do what so few slower pop songs have the ability to do - actually lift the soul of the listener and stir something inside of them.
And that, in essence is the key to the brilliance of The Good Will Out - it's such a beautiful sounding album that you don't want to turn it off. With a bevy of different producers, including the band themselves, Youth, and first-time producer Dave Creffield, The Good Will Out maintains a uniform sound, at its core, but isn't afraid to make changes around the edges.
Other highlights include "Retread", which opens with the great line of "My girl is just a retread/I lost her when I hit the brakes" and proceeds to tell the story of a relationship slowly approaching collapse. And to make the Queen comparison even more logical, the album closer is the seven-minute title track, which takes every element of the album and brings them all together for one last time.
It is rare in this line of work to actually find an album that you instantly fall in love with. The sheer volume of music that comes across your desk doesn't really afford you the luxury of spending hours with a single album and simply enjoying it. For Embrace, I'll gladly make that time. The Good Will Out is quite simply the most incredibly debut I've heard in the past five years, and if their shot at success is hampered by quick comparisons to other current British pop bands, then we should all be ashamed.
