We Are Scientists – ‘With Love And Squalor’ (Virgin Records) Released 17/10/05

 

Ever since The Strokes first captured our hearts back in 2001 with those thrilling early singles, American labels seem to have got wise to a credibility-building strategy: first break a band in the vastly smaller U.K, then take them back to America loaded with British hype. Result: Instant buzz. It worked with The Killers, Kings Of Leon and even The Bravery. Now it’s We Are Scientists’ turn.

If these three uber geek-chic New Yorkers were actual scientists created perhaps as a result of musical cloning, then a copy of Hot Heat Heat’s 2003 debut ‘Make Up The Breakdown’ would no doubt have played a part in the chemical process; both sexily desperate new-wave pop monsters, every track a potential single and club smash. But We Are Scientists are leaner, hungrier and infinitely more intriguing. They channel tales of pent-up frustration (opening track ‘Cash Cow’: I’m not gonna wait for anything to happen) in-security and alcohol-fuelled excess (‘This Scene Is Dead’: The night is young/I’m blacking out) to guitars that chop and fight to break hearts, while the choruses (imagine The Thermals on speed) almost run away from the actual songs themselves such is their breathlessness.

‘With Love And Squalor’ will be the soundtrack to a thousand (as their website says) “lucid, discerning people with amazing taste and salacious physiques” meeting over packed indie-club dancefloors around the country. It’s the album you drunkenly eulogise about to your friends on the night bus home, the sort of urgent, achingly poignant record people wait ages to hear. If Bloc Party’s ‘Silent Alarm’ began 2005 with a mix of oblique sloganeering and dancing, then We Are Scientists should end it, with a mix of old-school romanticism, tousled hair, and, well, even more dancing.