On today's mix...
Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster... (2008)

Never has a band deserved an exclamation point in their band name as much as Los Campesinos! I heard of the Welsh seven-piece through their zippy cover of Pavement's "Frontwards"--by far the most played track on my iTunes--and they more than follow through on their full-length debut. Hold On Now, Youngster... is the sound of a band busting out the gates at full speed, doing cartwheels, flips, and somersaults as they race through the trials of the heart, never bracing themselves for the inevitable crashes, and always getting up to run through the pain before their wounds have even been properly sutured. Through it all, their lively charm never wears thin or grows overly predictable. Hold On is a wild delight, full of male-female vocal exchanges and melodic counterpoint, unafraid to switch up the pace at the drop of a hat or suddenly build up into something epic, always with good humor. Though "You! Me! Dancing!" is a gem, the album highlight is "We Are All Accelerate Readers", an unstoppable heartbreaker that bemoans the immortality of cereal box characters, shouts to the skies that the opposite of love is reality, and bitterly laughs, "I'm no Toni Braxton." Toni Braxton wishes. Los Campesinos! are even more irresistible than "He Wasn't Man Enough For Me", and I mean that as the highest compliment.

9/10