We Are Scientists Album Recommendations: "With Love and Squalor"

Album Recommendations: With Love and Squalor

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

We Are Scientists

[#] With Love and Squalor (2005)

Restless, infectious, bite-sized dance-punk.

Reviewed October 30, 2019

We Are Scientists, for all the Lonely Island teamups in the world, couldn't manage to play more than bit parts in the 2000s post-punk revival wave, but it's not for lack of trying, talent, or efficiency. Guitar, bass, drums, voice, three guys, 37 minutes, minimal overdubs. It's not even a minute into the record that the explosions and touching start! It's a proper goddamn sprint of a record is what I'm saying, youthful, impatient, and sticky as all fuck (maybe from all the touching). The mainstream unfortunately never quite caught onto what We Are Scientists were up to, and that's a shame.

With Love and Squalor might play on the surface like a mix-and-match of their then-contemporary contemporaries (namely, The Killers and Interpol), but We Are Scientists trumps the lot by getting their shit down to...well, a science. Most of the magic comes down to Michael Tapper's hyperactive drumbeats, and without any synths in the mix, Keith Murray's guitar has to play lead and texture, often in the same part. It's downright economical. There's an awful lot to like about these blasts of dance-punk, packed tall with tremolo picking, pummeling drums, incessantly staccato bass, and increasingly desperate barking. Ironic, given the cats.