Sound bites: "With Love and Squalor"

We Are Scientists “With Love and Squalor” Virgin
Records

It looks like rock ‘n’ roll is dead. Again. SPIN
Magazine’s latest issue named The Killers as the 2005 band of
the year, the equivalent of calling Nickelback the next Nirvana or
Radiohead jamming with Coldplay. The Killers did not even release
an album last year, although a few of SPIN’s previous indie
crushes did; on “Plans,” Death Cab For Cutie collapsed
into a caricature, Bloc Party gave up halfway through “Silent
Alarm,” and the formerly arrogant Franz Ferdinand started
writing mushy ballads on “You Could Have It So Much
Better.” At least those groups have clever band names. We Are
Scientists, on the other hand, lets its music do the talking. For a
major-label band billed as an indie-rock act (like The Killers),
the group is less “indie” than it is fast, flashy rock,
though (unlike The Killers) it matches real dynamism to the guitar
theatrics. Musically, the Brooklyn trio is on fire, abandoning any
pretense of pandering balladry with an album full of razor-sharp
distorted guitars and lightning-quick bass lines. The riffs recall
the recent crop of moody post-punk acts ““ We Are Scientists
would sound at home next to Interpol and Bloc Party, though the
speedy pop-punk of early Green Day is an influence as well.
“Cash Cow” and “It’s A Hit” exemplify
the interesting melding of these two subgenres, energetic and slick
without compromising the instrumental back-and-forth that makes
groups such as Interpol so compelling. Singer/guitarist Keith
Murray lacks the distinctive vocal tone of Kele Okereke of Bloc
Party or even Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, but he gets
an “A” for effort ““ he’s nothing if not
enthusiastic on the chorus of “This Scene is Dead,” and
his deadpan delivery of the lines “It’s hard to rely on
the rhythm section” and “I’m counting all my
relevant friends” in the song “Inaction” is an
effectively ironic skewer of the New York City scene. One can only
take woe-is-me singing about being a singer so far, though, and too
much of the lyrical content treads the same ground. It’s not
until the band varies the music on the stand-out song
“Textbook” that the content also changes. The track is
thick and sludgy, slowing the pace and relying on thick distortion
to create a feeling of hopelessness which accompanies the
parenthesized backing vocals, “Having every question answered
isn’t gonna help at all.” Perhaps “With Love and
Squalor” is important not as a representation of what passes
for indie these days, but rather as the improbable discovery of
inspiration within a sound that is nearly played out. We Are
Scientists’ debut full-length album bends some genre barriers
and, at an efficient 37 minutes, never overstays its welcome. After
all, refreshing, unpretentious rock music never really dies. It
just goes out of style.

-David Greenwald