Speaking from personal experience, assumptions tend to be made about those of us blessed with a larger frame. Yes, we are capable of cheerfulness, even jollity, but don’t take it as a given. Normal in build, by the standards of all-miming, all-dancing pop stars, Romeo Stodart is chunky. But the music he and his sister Michele, and their friends Sean and Angela Gannon, make is not necessarily gleeful.

For all the supposed sunniness of the hits that made their name and pushed last year’s debut album to double platinum sales, there is a deep melancholy at the heart of the Numbers. Mournful songs such as Wheels on Fire and Hymn to Her were obviously introspective, but even seemingly chirpy singles such as Love Me Like You and Forever Lost were inspired by loss and unrequited love.

So it’s no real surprise that the follow-up should be a frequently downbeat affair. It opens brightly enough with an initial clutch of singles in waiting. The cunning This is a Song is catchy and expansive and the addictively simple chug of You Never Had It, for once under three minutes, owes plenty to the veteran American art-rockers Yo La Tengo. The first single Take a Chance, Numbers by numbers (in a good way), has already pleased fans, and the country-folk picking of Carl’s Song (apparently inspired by a dream in which Stodart met the late Carl Wilson, of the Beach Boys) is equally agreeable.

From then on things get patchier. Boy, with string arrangements by Robert Kirby, still best known for his work with Nick Drake, manages to successfully combine the Stax sound and English pastoralism; the similarly soulful Undecided shows what a great singer Angela Gannon can be; and the self-consciously epic Slow Down (The Way It Goes) alternately frustrates and elates, as brilliant flashes of melody emerge intermittently.

But with the exception of the lively Runnin’ Out — New Wave meets Fleetwood Mac and not miles from the similarly inclined Midlake — and Michele Stodart’s charming solo Take Me or Leave Me, too many flabby, unexceptional country ballads fill out the record. One imagines their A&R man’s despair each time Romeo called to announce the completion of another heartbreaker. The lovely closer Goodnight, featuring a third set of siblings on violin and harp, finally raises the mood.

In classic vinyl terms Side One is great, Side Two is tepid. That may not matter in our pick-and-mix age. Cynics might suggest that so many Numbers fans have young children that they never hear a record all the way through. But as the Stodarts are credited as producers they have to take responsibility.

An outsider might have ordered the band to speed up and redeem the sluggish Let Somebody In, or filled the unexplained gap in You Never Had It or simply curbed Romeo Stodart’s prolix tendencies (more than half the songs are over five minutes long). People like me shouldn’t admit this, but sometimes less is better.

Heavenly/EMI

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