when I saw them live ~18 years ago they made heavy use of gradual fade ins (swells) with an ernie ball volume pedal, it does have a similar sound to a reverse delay effect.
Yeah, that was about the same time when I saw them. From memory they just looked like your standard 3 piece but had those lovely backwards sounding swells. I recall being really surprised because it sounds like the sort of thing you’d struggle to do live.