The Earlies, Scala, London

It's time to rise and shine

At first glance, the fact that The Earlies smile a lot when playing live may come as a surprise. On their debut album, These Were The Earlies, the half-Lancastrian, half-Texan four-piece - who fill out to a multi-tasking, multi-instrumental 11-piece band live - hit on themes of mortality and humanity adrift between birth and death, looking for a home. Sadly, not every album's sleeve-notes include sentences such as: "I felt a deeper understanding of the phenomenology of the world." But the band make marvellously light of any such existential forays, favouring generosity over introspection and pairing a spirit-lifting sense of scope with approachability.

At first glance, the fact that The Earlies smile a lot when playing live may come as a surprise. On their debut album, These Were The Earlies, the half-Lancastrian, half-Texan four-piece - who fill out to a multi-tasking, multi-instrumental 11-piece band live - hit on themes of mortality and humanity adrift between birth and death, looking for a home. Sadly, not every album's sleeve-notes include sentences such as: "I felt a deeper understanding of the phenomenology of the world." But the band make marvellously light of any such existential forays, favouring generosity over introspection and pairing a spirit-lifting sense of scope with approachability.

The album's reference points have all been well noted. Musically, The Earlies elevate a very English kind of folk-psychedelia (think Sergeant Pepper-era Beatles, or The Beta Band) with a smattering of Beach Boys harmonies and the grandiose American spaciousness of, say, Mercury Rev. Indeed, taking into account the break-up of The Beta Band, the release of Brian Wilson's Smile, the availability of magic mushrooms on street-corner stalls and a need to redeem Texas-UK relations, their timing couldn't have been sweeter.

That they pull it off beautifully live is remarkable, too, given that the band composed the album by swapping fragments back and forth across the ocean - a singular kind of transatlantic jamming - and played their first shows only this year. A lot of planning must surely have gone into making the set work. The jocular band-members make it look effortless, though, happily putting down their guitars in favour of such less-wielded rock tools as flutes and a trumpet, the latter glee- fully blown by Tom Knott, an extremely hairy, cowboy- hatted and likeable-looking man, who couldn't look more prog-rock if he'd just stepped off the set of The Lord of the Rings.

The Earlies' keyboardist, arranger and "dictator", Christian Madden, freely admits the prog-rock influence, even including a thank-you to the "Knights of the Progressive Rock Movement" on the sleeve-notes of These Were The Earlies. But the band exude a buoyancy and languid melodiousness that veer far away from any bygone world of triple albums and narcolepsy-inducing noodling to something much more accessible and fully integrated.

"Bring It Back Again" hits the right note as the opener, setting lyrics such as, "Lord, I'm lost in a slow man's dream," to a gentle motorik thrum. Every track seems a triumph over the odds against organisation, though they're all delivered with a winningly self-deprecating blokishness: when Madden encourages us to buy their new single, "Morning Wonder", he does so with a so-sue-me shrug and a claim of: "Well, we're obviously Northern scrubbers."

As the song explodes from a soft-shuffle, Beta Band-style, looping lope into a cascade of sound, though, it's obvious that they're much more than that. Like The Flaming Lips, The Earlies pair density with delicacy, tunes with detail, and joy with depth, without lapsing into the sometimes strained cheesiness of The Polyphonic Spree. The lyrics occasionally veer toward abstraction, but that's hard to begrudge when even a line such as, "Maybe I'm the one who's already gone/ Cold in the ground", on the achingly wistful, Grandaddy-ish "One of Us Is Dead", is sung with so much good-vibe-spreading warmth.

The encore, too, a cover of The Moody Blues' "Ride My Seesaw", is embraced with a rare enthusiasm by the band: as Madden points out, it's the first time they've played a stage big enough to justify all 11 of them clambering off it and coming back on again. There'll be plenty of other times from here. It may sound unlikely, but these space-rocking, death-fixated existentialists sure know how to show a crowd a good time.

The Earlies play the Charlotte, Leicester, tonight; and South Street Arts Centre, Reading, tomorrow