Consumer Guide Album

Los Campesinos!: We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed [Arts & Crafts, 2008]
The painful detail and joyful exuberance are there once they get going. But in under two years this Welsh punk sextet has matured/devolved from tromping over their pan-sexual alienation like so many glockenspiel-wielding grape dancers to enacting "miserabilia" about how unfulfilling it is to get on your knees next to a urinal. Things aren't always so dire, and maybe that one is more ironic than the album title. But the joy of convincing punters they're a band is wearing off, leaving wordman Gareth less inclined to joke around about not just urinals but half-requited love and the "catastrophe" they still make a musical stab at staving off. So this really could be "The End of the Asterisk," and to put a point on it they bait their second 2008 album with one of the most underwhelming tour DVDs ever cross-collateralized. How little fame it takes these days to mess with people's heads. B+