No rest for the wickedly good

Talk about not resting on your laurels. On 13th October, barely five months after the release of their debut album Hold On Now, Youngster, SWSL faves Los Campesinos! are releasing its follow-up.

Featuring such songs as 'The End Of The Asterisk', 'Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1' and title track 'We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed', the record promises to be more of the same. However, while the Beatles-esque work ethic and hyper-productivity is to applauded, I do worry that it might possibly be one of those albums that bands excitedly rush out of the oven and onto the shelves, only to realise with the benefit of hindsight that it was a little half-baked.

Anyway, a propos of nothing other than the fact that I didn't link to it at the time and it's a handy substitute for the lack of a review of my own (promised but shamefully never delivered), here's former Stylus scribe Dom Passantino's take on Hold On Now, Youngster: "they’re free from all of the negative influences that British indie is committed to bathing itself in over and over again. Hold On Now, Youngster is an album completely free of The Kinks. Completely free of The Clash. Completely free of Weller or Morrissey or Gallagher or fucking Suggs". Amen to that.

And, just for good measure, here's Gareth's cut-out-and-keep guide to some of the tracks. True enough, he doesn't come across particularly well (that same combination of sensitivity, preciousness, self-consciousness and occasional bitterness evident from other interviews), but it's a bit rich of the readers of his beloved Drowned In Sound to criticise him for being a music snob in the comments thread...