Phil Spector’s early-’60s wall-of-sound masterpieces have been as big an influence on Scottish indie pop as has Brian Wilson’s sunny melodicism. The Delgados’ fourth album, however, could be the musical embodiment of Spector in early 2003. The lush and lovely orchestrations are still in place — 17 "additional musicians" are credited, plus a choir that projects "ah" and "oh" from here to eternity. But the music is not only sad and longing, it’s dark and meandering, occasionally contorting into odd chords and peaking into digital overload, giving away the group’s Scottish noise-pop lineage much more than do the resigned, featureless vocals from Alum Woodward and Emma Pollock. And whereas Spector’s classic songs yearned for love, the centerpiece here is "All You Need Is Hate," a bubbly sing-along as abjectly alienated as anything by Joy Division.

Elsewhere the group are more disconnected than they may have intended. Hate could represent another breakthrough after 2000’s celebrated The Great Eastern, but the songs’ unvarying start-small-end-huge formula becomes numbing. And the impressionistic lyrics rarely cohere as convincingly as they do in "All You Need Is Hate." Still, when Pollock sings "If we try too hard/Forgive us," it’s difficult to resist doing just that.