Pitchfork

Most of the time, a window is reassuringly binary. It divides outside from inside, light from heat, and watcher from watched, rendering objects beyond with picture-frame distinctness: the sun, the moon, the ballerina who lives across the courtyard. A world viewed only through a window, like a life lived only on cinema screens, may offer the illusion of clarity-- particularly comforting in an era parted between people too aware of their own fallibility and those convinced they can do no wrong-- and yet, as James Stewart's character learns in Rear Window, sometimes the illusion is real indeed.

On debut album Through the Windowpane-- which follows this year's mini-LP From the Cliffs-- London-based quartet Guillemots burst from the conventional pop frame with grand gestures, bold strokes, and bright colors, founding their songs upon both Nick Drake's elemental absolutes and the new psychedelia's omnivorous expansiveness. "Sometimes I could cry for miles," singer/keyboardist Fyfe Dangerfield warbles over dystopian piano on "Sao Paolo", a 12-minute genre-hopping victory lap that closes the album. If, in Guillemots' world, emotion is measured in distance, surely it's on a massive scale. Through the Windowpane is at times a last-dance hallelujah, at other times an open wound, but it's never meager, and hardly ever mundane.

Such overwhelming nimiety is best administered in small doses, at least at first. In 2005 and 2006, the release of Guillemots' full-length was preceded by three EPs (one online-only) and three singles, each representing the band's ecstatic side. With a "You Can't Hurry Love" rhythm and carnival brass, "Trains to Brazil" discovers Dexy's pop ebullience in an accidental police killing, celebrating life even as the lyrics of "prophets and their bombs" (and trains!) draw an apparently coincidental tragic parallel to last year's London bombings and the sober reality of life during wartime. The whirring percussion of "We're Here" again invokes rail travel, though the words may point more toward Aladdin: "The world is our carpet now," exults Dangerfield, leaping to keep up with strings that match the giddy new-love joy of a truly successful "second dinner date."

Dangerfield's voice is strange and beautiful, enlivening the tender (if exhausting) assuredness of Jeff Buckley with a few sublimely bizarre tics. On Guillemots' third and arguably best single, the aggressively chiming "Made Up Love Song #43", Dangerfield lavishes the bridge of a near-perfect lovesong (in the self-aware Divine Comedy mode) with gut-pounding avian squawks that blur the line between lover and madman, while a backing choir oohs and ahhs as if Phil Spector were there pistol cocked. "There's majesty in a burnt-out caravan," Dangerfield explains in advance; Guillemots' hugeness is tied inextricably to a fundamental weirdness-- which should shield the band from ill-considered comparisons to the dull bombast of Keane and their ilk. Through the Windowpane's whirring, windblown title track reverses Dangerfield's limber vocal, then casts it aloft for further wordless invocations.

Where such fellow maximalists as Go! Team stick to cheerleading and Animal Collective opt for distance, Guillemots extend their vivid, explosions-as-the-costars-kiss style of songwriting even to wussy topics. Opener "Little Bear" drapes Dvořák-esque strings over a simple, faltering melody as Dangerfield paints a bittersweet breakup in sky, soil and bracken wood. "If I had you, all the stars wouldn't fall from the sky/ And the moon wouldn't start to cry/ There'd be no earthquakes," he adds unadorned over plinking orchestration on "Blue Would Still Be Blue", putting longing into hyperbolic, through-the-window language sure to sicken the unsentimental. "If the World Ends" is an incantatory slowdance swooner, "Redwings" is where Sondre Lerche meets "You Can't Always Get What You Want", and "A Samba in the Snowy Rain" is an abstract choral vision evoking Talk Talk's "New Grass".

And yet a window is not merely a transparent frame, but a physical part of the view, too. Guillemots surely know this (they're named after a bird, after all). Even as they cast an eye on their surroundings with unreal clarity-- sun, moon, love, stars-- Guillemots can't help but step into the framed picture, looking out and confronting their own reflections in the dark: jazz, samba, classical, Motown, AM-pop, indie-rock, anthem-rock. On 2001's "Life in a Glass House", Thom Yorke sang of a desire to paper over all the panes; Guillemots guitarist MC Lord Magrao once played his guitar facing a set of mirrors that reflected the crowd back to itself. The doors of perception may never be cleansed, but on Through the Windowpane, these four bring the infinite, as much as the binary, a little closer to sight.