(Arts & Crafts)

Literate, self-deprecating break-up pop you can dance to. Wait...what?!

You know your late teens/early 20s? The years in which your favourite bands and girl problems and hanging out at bars surpass university and work in importance and, in your own mind, everything you do is tinted with romance, immortality and profundity? Now, pretend those years of your life have been made into a movie, possibly starring Michael Cera. Well, a group of seven Welsh indie-pop wunderkinds have totally made the soundtrack for it. Shredding their guitars, furiously carving their violins and thrashing their glockenspiels in a spitting rampage, the group’s messy, swirling, youthful darkness and eloquence hooks you in with its infectious mini-orchestra-pop, accompanied by call-and-response, boy/girl vocals. Lead singer Gareth’s plummy lyrics are spit-fire fast; his furious, eloquent poetising of youthful despondency at times recall Morrissey’s best turns of phrase and are the type of things you feel like scribbling all over your walls. In the record’s glorious, tangled centrepiece, the album’s title track, when all the kids collaboratively scream: “Oh we kid ourselves there’s future in fucking / but there is no fucking future!” if you don’t get shivers up your spine, there’s something wring with you. Including badges, a DVD, a poster and a ‘zine featuring contributions by Xiu Xiu, Parenthetical Girls and Granddaddy, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is a delightfully cranky musical mish-mash of Gen Y ideas – heartbreak, bands, pubs and your favourite lyrical quotations.

SOPHIE BLACKHALL-CAIN

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