Los Campesinos – Hello Sadness

This Welsh collective make nihilist anthems about vomit, football pitches and broken hearts (often all three within one spitting line). If you can bring yourself to pardon the awful middle third of the album, the limpness of the line “It starts pretty rough and ends up even worse” and an annoying rant about the English football team, you find three solid songs at either end of the track-list. The album starts with a catchy-as-a-cold ode to hand-jobs and finishes with 2011’s three best break-up songs. The definition of a mixed bag.