With Love and Squalor, Joe

Pick a name out of a hat. This week it's We Are Scientists, but this could've easily been any other band that sounds like We Are Scientists. Imagine what this week would look like if, I dunno, maybe Hot Hot Heat was picked out of the hat, for example. Then you'd be treated to more silly anecdotes from my days playing drums in a band called Burholme (because, you see, we also played two Hot Hot Heat songs). I would reminisce about the time Burholme played a set at Kev C.'s high school graduation party, and how I was so drunk that I couldn't remember the words to the "Goodnight Goodnight," a song whose verses I am 90% sure I would normally sing (though I could be wrong about that, it's been a while). I would write a humorous sidenote about how we also played "Moby Dick" that day, and I used my drum solo as an opportunity to drum on Kev's dad's priceless refurbished 1967 Corvette, stopping the party cold, which wouldn't really add much to anyone's understanding of Hot Hot Heat in this hypothetical Elevator review, but would certainly add some flavor to the proceedings. Plus, it would provide a natural transition to some cliché thesis that I would no doubt pull out of my ass, something along the lines of "this music was OUR music" or some such shit like that.

But that's not how the chips fell this week. There were a lot of bands back in the day that I felt a great affection for, and a great many of those bands sounded exactly like We Are Scientists, and existed in the same exact space as We Are Scientists. It just so happens that I've never heard a single note of any We Are Scientists song before this week, here in September 2022, at least fifteen years past the deadline for a band such as this to establishment themselves in my mind and my memories. We Are Scientists are playing a losing game at this point, at least for me personally (though I have faith in our members of Record Club that someone is going to pipe up and proclaim that this is one of their favorite bands from high school, and their review will be all the better because of it).

Yes, We Are Scientists have a sound that was far from unique in the mid-aughts. My first thought was Hot Hot Heat, because the vocals sound pretty similar, but you could name countless bands from that time that you could fit into this slot. Think the Kooks. Think the Fratellis. Think the Futureheads. Think the Cribs. Think the Wombats if you're feeling generous. Think Tokyo Police Club if you're feeling cruel. (And sure, think Arctic Monkeys, but only if you're out of your fucking mind and believe some conspiracy theory shit about AM breaking up after Favourite Worst Nightmare or something.)

There is an established term for bands like this, all bands who caught the wave that the Strokes created and rode it into their own brief, watered-down semi-fame with a few good songs that sold well because young men on both sides of the Atlantic were really into that shit at that point, for some reason. I should know. I was one of them. Do you know how many fucking times I played the Kooks' "She Moves in Her Own Way" during the summer of 2007? And here in 2022, can you guess how many Kooks songs I can name off the top of my head? Hint: less than two.

But so the established term is: "landfill indie." The implication being that the market for indie-learning guitar music played by bands that consisted of four anonymous young moppets was a bit oversaturated, and so the millions and millions of combined albums sold in this one collective genre are now forgotten and sit at the bottom of a landfill.

I get the joke, and it's a good one, but I disagree with the premise. I'll argue that it wasn't that we as a (mostly young, mostly white, mostly male) culture loved these bands one day and forgot about them the next. It was more that we all separately loved very specific bands within this very specific genre, and it was those bands and their albums and songs that we chose, then, in our youth, to never forget, not ever... which of course means that there are countless other bands who sound exactly like our bands that we never got into, and so it wasn't a matter of forgetting so much as it was a matter of never knowing and never caring. I get that it looks like no one cares about any of these mid-'00s indie rock bands anymore, but it's more that some people care about some of it, and that joy is so fractured throughout such a large contingent of music listeners that it feels like the whole thing was thrown in a landfill. I can assure you that is not the case. I still listen to Hot Hot Heat.

To say that I threw We Are Scientists into a landfill and filled it over with dirt is WAY too harsh. I didn't dismiss We Are Scientists; I never even had the opportunity to. Had someone played me With Love and Squalor back in the mid-to-late-aughts, then there is a really great chance that I would've loved it the way I do "my" indie rock "landfill" albums (and not just because I was not yet out of my requisite Salinger phase).

I would've related to this album and this band, for sure, no doubt after like eight Milwaukee's Best Premiums to the face, listening to songs about trying not to get to drunk, songs that work as a naked appeal to the opposite sex from very needy and pathetic little boys, songs that in general speak to the "challenges" of youth that, in time, eventually turn into "those were the days." I can say that We Are Scientists were of a certain time period, and I mean that in two ways: they were a band that played the sound of a time that has since passed; they were a band that played to an audience that has since grown up.

As it stands now, there is no doubt that I missed the boat. I'm sure that once upon a time there was an opportunity for With Love and Squalor to be the soundtrack to a very specific night, but that time is long gone. Now, I'll listen to music like this for the first time, and I'll feel certain vibrations from alternate universes, but that's about it. Otherwise, it's a catchy album that ultimately means absolutely nothing to me.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5