Saying I was excited for Boxer The Horse’s first full-length would be a bit of an understatement. After all, I was a huge fan of their debut EP; in fact, one of its tracks, “Jackson Leftfield”, is easily one of my all-time favourite songs. As such, I was eager to see whether the band would be able to not just capture everything that made it so special, but sustain that level of poppy energy over twice as many songs.First, the bad news: there’s nothing as good as “Jackson Leftfield”. Of course, as far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the best songs ever written, so if Boxer The Horse couldn’t quite come up with a second all-time great song just two years later…well, I think that’s forgivable, particularly when you consider that the rest of Would You Please is better than everything else that was on The Late Show.And that really is outstanding news, because behind “Jackson Leftfield”, The Late Show was a pretty outstanding EP. The band demonstrated then that they were capable of finding some previously unsuspected middle ground between Franza Ferdinand and rootsy jangle-pop; here they show that not only does that middle ground exist, it’s actually a pretty fertile creative area. Songs like “Everything’s Better In Europe” and “Sketch Me A Glove” alternate between FF’s slinky brand of dance-rock and, bouncy, Two Hours Traffic-esque pop, with the band consistently showing that it’s possible to simultaneously be a little sleazy and extremely sunny. A big chunk of that, of course, comes down to the fact that frontman Jeremy Gaudet has a voice that’s both of those things at once, but he and his bandmates deserve a lot of credit for the way they’re able make wholesome, upbeat pop that has doesn’t sound totally sexless.Ultimately, that’s what helps Would You Please survive the fact it’s lacking a single, all time great song — it’s got eleven tracks that could still measure up to the output of pretty much any other band out there. It’s a recipe for a great full-length, and it’s enough to make me believe that Boxer The Horse have the talent to go from one-song wonders to one of Canada’s best pop acts.