Hold On Now, Youngster

There really isn’t anything wrong with this album. It’s just the most amazing sugar rush you’re going to have this year, and is what, at this point in time, sounds strongly like the best debut album by a British indie band since Tigermilk.

The tasteful kiddy nature and contrastingly mature metaphors, literary lessons and appropriate disdain, all end with a sense of urgency, making for an impressively full album [Winter 2008, p.100]

Hold On Now, Youngster is the proverbial promising debut, brimming with attitude, ideas and oomph. We await their next move with interest.

Their debut album is a riotous cacophony of perfectly sculpted indie boisterousness.

This debut is unusually taut and polished, with hooks, crescendos, and clever turns of phrase nearly always in the right place.

The band's full-length debut continues where last year's "Sticking Fingers Into Sockets" EP left off. [Winter 2008, p.82]

It might be one big, saccharine, catchy fuck-you to the industry and culture, but it's really just addictive songwriting reared on Britpop pioneers who didn't prioritize reputation over substance.

LC! balance their more precious tendencies-winsome vocals, chiming xylophone--with a sharp wit and ideas that arrive in energetic tumbles. [Mar 2008, p.88]

Spirited and frenetic, Hold On adds up to more than just the sum of the band's five-star libraries. [Apr 2008, p.100]

Chock-full of glockenspiel, keyboards, hand claps and boy-girl harmonies, Youngster is playful and fun.

While their coming-of-age tales entertain some, it's their 'us versus the world ' spirit that makes this such an enthralling debut.

Hold on Now, Youngster... succeeds where the band does hold on: to genuine emotions, to vulnerability, to a cohesion that threatens to shatter under the pressure of self-deprecation and relentless skin-pounding.

Recommending this album seems too light a course of action; requiring it may be more apt. Consider Hold on Now, Youngster...highly required, then.

For a band about whom most of the talk (pro and con) has focused on their unrelenting giddiness, Los Campesinos! have produced a debut that's surprisingly muddled emotionally.

However much Los Campesinos! need a good editor--both for its music and lyrics--a red pen would only ruin the fun.

The Welsh band's debut full-length captures more believable, crackling punk energy than most hardcore bands.

Cynics and those who just don’t feel it may claim instead that this is, at best, just a collection of good songs, with witty lyrics, without much dynamic variation; but I tell you today, five or ten or 20 years from now, the only way we won’t be speaking of Hold on Now, Youngster… as a classic will be if Los Campesinos! have already topped it.

Even Youngster’s more modest near-ballads, like 'My Year in Lists,' preserve the band’s boisterous style through outlandish lyrics (“You said, ‘Send me stationery to make me horny’/So I always write you letters in multi-colors”) and ecstatic delivery, making twee fare like long-distance relationships or working in a bookstore seem like serious pop paydirt.

A welcome throwback to the raw energy of early Kill Rock Star bands, this delirious debut still boasts enough cheeky vigor to sound fresh and new.

A glockenspiel in a guitar band? Freshens up the sound, they think. And they're right.

It's the sort of album that at times sounds like the group simply threw everything against the wall and hoped that something would stick. In many cases, it did, but in others it sounds like a raucous mess.