The summer months can pose a problem for the bookish indie kid. Pale interesting skin can tan, the days are long, the sun is often out, if your not careful you could find yourself actually…happy. This clearly will not do, if you’re happy how are you supposed to keep your veneer of indie cool? At this rate you’ll be throwing away your vintage-retro-irony clothes and cutting off that stupid haircut. Maybe you won’t even cry yourself to sleep every night, how are you going to be interesting then?

With this in mind I present, for your self-pity and entertainment, distressing and depressing summer songs.

Never trust a hippie, John Lennon was clearly wrong when he proclaimed that “love is all you need” and 25 years later scottish dour-mongers The Delgados asserted exactly the opposite in their paean to pessimism �All You Need Is Hate.� It sure as hell sounds like a summer song; strings soar and melodies jangle but then you realise that with dead-eyed, smiley-faced sincerity The Del’s are imploring you to hate hate hate. It’s all around, it’s in the air and it’s in your mother’s heart. Don’t forget this.

Scots understand miserablism like few other nations, even when the sun is shining outside it’s still drizzling in their hearts. While The Delgados got their kicks from hiding the darkness within behind musical prettiness, their some-time label mates Arab Strap prefer to look you straight in the eye and tell you exactly how bad life is. Singer Aiden Moffat doesn’t really sing, he’s too glum for that, he simply narrates wretched (autobiographical?) tales of drunkenness and heartbreak in a bored and broken monotone. �The First Big Weekend� is actually one of the band’s lighter moments, on the first “big weekend” of the summer Aiden and his friends go out and get wasted in various bars and clubs. Such meaningless hedonism would almost sound like fun if it wasn’t for the monotonous, metronomic backbeat and the fact that Moffat delivers his lines in the style of a funeral eulogy.

A couple of hundred miles south in Sheffield, lives Richard Hawley an old-fashioned crooner who deals in old-school, Scott Walker style despair. Despite the summery title �Sunlight� has the same theme as pretty much every song Richard Hawley has ever written, agonising relationship meltdown. He also has one of the most miserable voices in pop music, comparable to Morrissey or Lenard Cohen. When he sings “Oh, the end, the end�” you know just everything is hopeless, his life, your life, everything.

Enjoy the rest of your summer.

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