A lot of great music exists out there. But NBN can’t devote a slot to every CD that hits shelves, especially for bands most of you have never heard of. So, that’s where we come in. Due to our indie-leanings here at One-Click Wonders, we catch all the music too obscure for the main page, and offer up a quick take on it. Today, we laugh off our broken heart with Los Campesinos!

The majority of art, especially music, stems from heartbreak and the constant pain life tends to hurl at people from every eachway. For the artist, expressing this agony becomes their main focus, trying to rid themselves of it in someway or another. Some wallow in it, creating works rich with sadness. Others use that melancholy to propel themselves to joy, either finding hope from dire situations or turning misery into joy. Los Campesinos! cope with love gone awry with shouts, catchy choruses and goofy jokes about Toni Braxton and Livejournal.

The Cardiff seven-piece’s debut album Hold on Now, Youngster… sounds simple enough, resembling what would happen if a current British “buzz” band (imagine The Kooks or Artic Monkeys) loaded up on sugar and listened to Heavenly for a couple of hours. Los Campesinos! load their first full-lenght LP with shiny bells, jangly guitars and witty lyricism, coming off as a harder-edged twee band. The most obvious band to compare them with is Art Brut circa their debut album – both run on nearly-spoken vocals, witty verses and irresistible choruses. Opening tune “Death to Los Campesinos!” showcases all three right away, the group singing about destroying technology (sample lyric: “I’ll be CTRL-ALT-DLTing your face without reservation”) before hitting the delicious chorus, featuring group-shouted words above a rapid-stream of guitars and xylophone hits. It’s an immediately catchy song, and the perfect introduction to the group, as most of the tunes here follow that formula (though closing tracks “…And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison” and “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” sound slightly stand out the most).

Los Campesino’s! sound doesn’t need much explaining, it’s hyperactive indie-pop, and they sound great. What makes this album so much better than the output of Art Brut (and nearly every other British rock outfit creating music right now) is the broken heart the band clutches throughout. Eddie Argos and company focus on schtick over sentiments, making jokes about hipsters, Top of the Pops and Los Angeles, rarely showing much true emotion. Los Campesinos, meanwhile, fill every song on their debut with at least a little melancholy, giving their tracks a little more humanity and beauty. “Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats” spazzes out sonically, but the words skip with pain disguised as humor(”You know he’s so much more like Spiderman than you will ever, ever be,” a funny way of telling a former love you’ve found someone a whole lot better than them). “Don’t Tell me to do the Math(s)” features cries of “don’t read Jane Eyre” and “never play card games,” but also hints at unrequited love with a line about trying to jumpstart someone’s heart by sticking their fingers into sockets. Los Campesinos! don’t drown themselves in pity, they try to laugh about it using pop-culture references and scenester-baiting imagery. The protagonist of “Knee Deep at ATP” gets his heart shattered at a music festival when the girl he fancies holds hands with a guy wearing a K Records t-shirt, and those small details offer some sort of humor amidst a pretty depressing moment.

The three best songs deal with emotions to the extreme while retaining the band’s upbeat sound. “We Are All Excelerated Readers” opens with an immensly grim view of future girlfriends before busting out “And no more conversations about which Breakfast Club character you’d be/I’d be the one that dies/No one dies/Well then what’s the point?” The song chugs sadly along via sorrowful violins and relentless drums, eventually hitting one of the best moments of the album, the shouted line “The opposite of true love is as follows/reality!” Even better (and one that hits a little closer to home) is “My Year in Lists,” a fast-paced ditty about rejecting ideas like list-making and New Year’s Resolutions since, “you must confess that at times like these/hopefullness is tantamount to hopelessness.” Hold on Now, Youngster’s… emotional and musical blockbuster is the triumphant “You! Me! Dancing!,” released last year on an EP. It’s the one moment on an album hiding lots of pain where the band just goes crazy, cramming all their instruments together behind a ten-note guitar riff, throwing all their voices together for the simplest yet greatest chorus on an album overflowing with them. Most importantly, the song oozes joy, a shy kid afraid of getting on the dancefloor realizing it is a good idea to dance, and that it’s fun. A must hear.

Los Campesinos! capture all the great aspects of “twee” sound without ever sounding truly twee, never sounding puny or weak but always confident and boisterous, but still facing the hurdles of love gone wrong. Hold on Now, Youngster… balances catchy tunes with heartbreak, and better than most. An artist has to deal with depression, so why not face it with xylophones and Jane Eyre references?

Bonus video for “Death to Los Campesinos!”