Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too 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

[#] Brain Thrust Mastery (2008)

Bringing the dance floor experience home, tinnitus and all.

Reviewed November 4, 2024

"I realize that I'm just naturally inclined to go and let you down"—see, that's refreshing honesty from a bunch of 2000s indie punk rejects. With Love and Squalor is a big childhood favorite of mine, its guitars spiky, its songs barreling, its tempos fast and its lyrics biting and disaffected, and Brain Thrust Mastery effectively delivers a more sedate version of that general sound. That's not necessarily a bad thing: lead single "After Hours", We Are Scientists' strummy John Hughes ode to late-night intoxication, might as well be the nostalgic, syrupy indie tune of 2008. It's just that the band has traded mindless filler dance-punk for sleepy filler ballads, and the mix only makes the quieter moments that much harder to enjoy.

Note the 80s streak running through Brain Thrust Mastery. That decade's hollow reverb, shimmery synths, and saucy horns power songs like "Lethal Enforcer" and the drifting, boomy ballad "Spoken For", and Brain Thrust's best songs, like the pummeling "Tonight" and the sneering, 70s-by-80s disco barnburner "Chick Lit", positively run with the sound with exciting results. Less exciting is this album's perfect demonstration of the swampy, exaggerated excesses of the loudness war in action. I wasn't kidding when I said "Spoken For" was boomy—play it full blast and feel it through your chair, and not in the good way. Penultimate "Dinosaurs" might as well be one solid block of sound. Yuck.

[#] 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.