Simon Balthazar is scanning a menu, and he’s completely overwhelmed.  The lanky, fair-skinned Swede is contorting the laminated sheet in his hands, trying his damndest to discern the differences between enchiladas, quesadillas, and flautas, but his bandmates are offering little help.  Violinist/keyboardist Cathy Lucas already has picked the first thing that shouted vegetarian, while the other members have settled on random orders that, for Balthazar, all are completely alien.  Assured that they all are variations of the rice-beans-and-tortillas formula, the Fanfarlo frontman orders something with a waxing confidence, hoping mostly that he just doesn’t fuck it up.

Of course, this is just one of several indoctrinations that London-based Fanfarlo has had in its time stateside.  The previous night, while staying with a friend before Austin’s South by Southwest festival, the band experienced what some would call a Texas rite-of-passage: firing guns openly on rural land, aiming for nothing but the stars.  The recording of their debut album, Reservoir, was caked with similar oddities.  The group – Balthazar, Lucas, multi-instrumentalist Leon Beckenham, bassist Justin Finch, and drummer Amos Memon – recorded in Connecticut with Peter Katis at a house that previously was owned by a cult.

“[Katis and his family] still had really weird people come and knock on the door and start talking to them,” Balthazar said.  “Because it used to be this open house.  You could just walk in and get fed.  People would just walk in and steal stuff, as well.  So a lot of weirdness.”

But it’s not as though weirdness wasn’t a factor back home in London.  The group formed in 2006 when Balthazar came to London with an assortment of demos and was looking to put together a band.  When the group finally organized, they rehearsed in a rather shady warehouse in an industrial region of town, close to Memon’s work.

“It was pretty special getting there,” said Balthazar, with a grin. “[It took] a bit of everything: different modes of transport and then this road that led up to it with all these kind of dumped cars on it.”

Their shifting eyes tell the story: It wasn’t where you would think to find one of the U.K.’s most in-demand unsigned bands.

Despite the adventures, the underlying thread of Fanfarlo is how much control the band has exercised over its career to this point.  A team of managers and agents watch over their every step during SXSW, advising them how to budget their time and, occasionally, what to order off the menu.  But Fanfarlo still released Reservoir independently, although most bands would sign along the dotted line with a quarter of the hype that the band has received since releasing demos years ago.

They became a darling of the blogosphere, an ambitious, orchestral band with soft melodies, swift harmonies, and brushes of indie rock bliss.  With diverse instrumentation (members revolve between trumpet, saxophones, mandolins, melodicas, and just about anything else they can get their hands on), the group has a detailed-but-accessible style.  The demos gave evidence of a band that had a natural tendency toward whimsicality but with the potential for the grandiose.  The Net started taking notice, and Fanfarlo became a proverbial buzz band.

“What’s funny and what kind of really shocked me a bit [was that] when it was ready and we started dropping bits of information, people would actually have, like, five people repeat things like, ‘Fanfarlo wrote in their mailouts that the title of the record is such-and-such!’ and, ‘Here’s the fucking tracklist!’ ” Balthazar said.  “I didn’t think people did that before.”

That blogosphere buzz also led to opportunity.  The band was tabbed by Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol to open a few dates in the U.K., playing to massive audiences.  Although modest by comparison, more than a few people at SXSW had their ears perked for the band that long had been touted as an up-and-comer.

But that’s the strangest part of Fanfarlo: They’ve had amazing patience, despite being pinpointed by the online community years ago.

“We’re pretty big on really sort of keeping control of what we’re doing,” Balthazar said.  “So far, we haven’t worked with a label, and that’s for a reason.  We’ve been holding out.  We’ve been doing everything super, super slow.  But it’s worth it.  We don’t feel like we want to compromise.  It’s so much more about the music than the career.”

As slow as the group wants to keep it, Reservoir might not give them much of a chance.  It’s brimming with memorable swoops of orchestral whimsicality, a sound that’s hard to ignore.

“I guess it was sort of this sonically intense, sort of big, spine-tingling sound,” Finch said when discussing the direction that the band took with its sound.  “Everyone keeps bringing up Arcade Fire, obviously, but it’s that sort of thing.  It’s that sort of total folky, rootsy base.  There’s just so much going on.  That was always our point.”

Now, with a tangible album released, the band is going to have to exercise more control than ever.  Instead of trying to hide from label representatives and blogosphere magnifying lenses, the band has to embrace it.  Memon says the road that lies ahead is “not daunting.”

“There’s challenges, and we like to meet them head-on,” he said.

“We do hate the press, though,” Lucas joked.

This is, in a nutshell, a good cross-section of Fanfarlo.  They are charming and witty but very careful with their words.  Memon, Lucas, and Balthazar are conversational and soft-spoken, but at the same time, they are excitable, animated, and eager to talk about their music.  Finch, perhaps the most talkative of the group, sports thick glasses, suspenders, and boots, lending himself to a more punk aesthetic that seems out of place in the otherwise clean-cut band.  He rolls his own cigarettes and makes jovial poses for cameras.  Despite individuality like this, the bandmates flow off each other perfectly, although this wasn’t always the case.  During recording, guitarist Mark West departed from the band.

“We lost a member,” Balthazar said.

“We still don’t know where he is,” Finch laughed.  “He’s still lost.”

“That’s when we really worked out who we wanted to be: through the process of recording,” Lucas said.

The lineup shift (ultimately chalked up to “musical and aesthetic differences”) hasn’t affected the dynamic of the band.  In fact, it’s drawn them together.  It also sheds some light on how tight Fanfarlo is.  They have worked hard to keep their destiny in their own hands, and it’s revealing to the extent that nothing has been able to dent their carefully crafted status as one of the most anticipated unsigned bands in the U.K.  In a matter of time, the label deal, stadium opening slots, and worldwide travel all will come, but, for Fanfarlo, they get to say when.