Independent on Sunday, album review

4 and a half stars For their second successive release (see also ‘Lil’ Beethoven’), the Mael brothers, surely the most underrated and enduringly excellent band of the last 35 years – have delivered a collection of songs which share a conceptual unity: Wagnerian operettas fashioned from everyday occurrences. On ‘Hello Young Lovers’, their 20th album, Ron and Russell take the most quotidian of scenarios – another guy staring at your girlfriend’s legs in a restaurant – and inflate it into an epic psychodrama. To achieve that , and somehow incorporate humorous insights and profound emotional truths too, requires a special kind of genius. That’s the Mael prerogative.