We Are Scientists
Lobes
MASTERSWAN/100%
Two albums in a little over 15 months is the shortest gap between records in their career, so it would be fair to say that We Are Scientists are on a particularly creative streak. The band—Keith Murray, Chris Cain, and unofficial third member since 2013 Keith Carne—made the most of the pandemic-enforced downtime throughout 2020 and 2021 by completing one record and cranking out a second. As such, Lobes features a clutch of songs that didn’t quite fit in on 2021’s Huffy.
They’re quite a bit removed from the dance-punk days and their biggest hits, sure, but plenty of fans who came on board around their 2005 debut With Love and Squalor are still hanging on, and they’ve had the privilege of seeing the mid-’00s indie survivors blossom into an albums band who can repeatedly stick the landing while pushing their sound forward in subtle ways. No great overhaul has taken place; Murray’s voice is distinctive enough to spot the throughlines from something like “Lethal Enforcer” (off 2008’s big-swing second album Brain Thrust Mastery) to “Settled Accounts,” which adds a dollop of funk to a sound that’s slick, but never anodyne, and full of incisive musical and lyrical hooks as Murray takes himself to task: “Why keep asking questions / When everything that’s done has been / Committed by my own damn hands, and I’ll do it again?”
Second track “Dispense with Sentiment” marks itself out as an early highlight: a tale of anxiety, overthinking, and getting lost in one’s own head that sets out the darker and moodier blueprint the trio are working with this time around. It proves that they can still pen a chorus like it’s nobody’s business—even as Murray admits he can’t quite get his thoughts in order (“I’m trying to make sense / Can we start again and drop our defences?”) before adding in some withering self-effacement in verse two (“I’d try harder to be useful, I guess / If I thought usefulness would be any good”).
Murray deserves his due as a lyricist; likewise, it’s not so hard to rely on the rhythm section these days. Cain and Carne add their own flourishes to the proceedings, with the former’s stuttering bassline laying the foundations for “Human Resources,” and the latter’s percussion seemingly everywhere at once on the emotive “Lucky Just to Be Here” (check for a pulse if its soaring bridge doesn’t spark something in you). The more electronic and synthesized turn explored on Lobes speaks to how inspired they’ve been; there’s little room for missteps on a 10-song, 36-minute record that feels much shorter than that. “Operator Error,” a punchy song about sweating the small stuff, slots nicely into the band’s collection of killer openers, while “Turn It Up” and penultimate track “Less From You” flip the script and find the trio cutting loose, feeling the fear, and doing it anyway.
Conceived as the nighttime counterpart to the considerably sunnier Huffy, the personal examinations across their latest offering feed into the approach the band took when putting those albums together. Like its predecessor, Lobes is self-produced and finds We Are Scientists in fine form, continuing to take risks yet not losing sight of what got them to this point in the first place; nor are they content to coast on the goodwill of those early albums. There’s plenty of creative juice in the tank yet.
