Urban Outfitters, the only place wear you can buy a brand new vintage t-shirt for the low low cost of $25. I will let the reader figure out what is wrong with that last sentence (Hint Hint: It's 4 things, including grammar mistakes, see answer key below). Urban Outfitters is a place any trendy kid loves to hate...after buying said super sweet t-shirt from the store. An Urban Outfitters was also the odd place I found Hint Hint playing at during the 2004 SXSW Music Conference in Austin.

The second night I was in Austin I arrived at a Suicide Squeeze & Friends showcase having just missed Hint Hint's live set. According to the Music Director at Colgate University's WRCU, Hint Hint was amazing and I was basically less of a person for not having see them. Lucky for me, they were playing at Urban Outfitters the next day so I had an excuse to shop for some new pants, I mean, see this great live band.

My first image of a band that would play an Urban Outfitters is a generic 'indie rock' band that is played on MTV2 a lot and is signed to a supposedly small indie label which is really owned by one of the major labels. But for some reason the Urban Outfitters in Austin during SXSW had a line-up with bands whose credentials would pass the average indie snob's judgement: Matador's Preston School of Industry, Sub Pop's All Night Radio, StarTime International's The Natural History, and, of course, Suicide Squeeze's Hint Hint.

And so I found myself in the middle of the day surreally watching an indie rock band play in a store where customers spent more money on clothes than the band members were paid to play SXSW (about $125 for a wristband that let the band go to SXSW shows during the evening). And to quote a t-shirt that can be found at an Urban Outfitters near you, 'Revolution Rock!' Well, not really 'revolution,' Hint Hint is classic post-punk nervousness complete with jagged guitar melodies, dark keyboards, nervously muttered singing, all being played to a beat that cruelly makes skinny white losers shake their hips (or at least awkwardly tap their feet). But they sure were rocking! When playing live, Hint Hint's music is so darkly danceable I found myself bopping my head and shuffling my feet to the point that I didn't care if they showed their influences on their sleeve (ha, clothing related cliche, hilarious), or if I knocked over those neatly folded t-shirts on the table in front of me.

And basically the new Hint Hint album Young Days is just like Urban Outfitters, full of overpriced clothing you just gotta have, but that you have to pretend you don't want....hmm, thinking about it, the album is not really like Urban Outfitters at all, I just really wanted to justify my whole Urban Outfitters intro/short story.

One thing that Young Days is not though, is as non-stop disco dancing, rock spasm inducing as their live shows, or their debut EP Sex is Everything. Sex is Everything seemed to care for little else except to make you violently shake your body along with every stabbing guitar line and cymbal crash. Which was all great fun for the 20 minute EP. However, Hint Hint wisely decide that for a full-length such a non-stop attack would likely get tiresome.

Not to say the band has abandoned their energetic full out post-punk assault, the album in fact opens with a bang with 'Natural Collegiate.' Lead singer Peter Quirk anxiously mumbles dark somethings about how "the country was in hysterics" and was "stabbing itself in the palm to prove that it's right" while at the same time a catchy bass line and pounding drum constantly move you as you try to avoid getting cut by the short, but still somehow melodic, guitar lines (it's almost as exhausting as reading that last sentence!). But, on most of the songs on Young Days the band mixes up these highs with tension building, slower tempo sections. The title track does this masterfully. The majority of the song is spent with hushed keyboards and occasionally strummed guitar as the beat propels Quirk's oblique worries which occasionally boil over into a torrent of guitar and cymbal crashes before simmering back down to resigned tension.

The songs on Young Days accomplish the amazing feat of making the build-ups just as enjoyable as the occasional releases. By sacrificing the immediacy of Sex is Everything, Hint Hint has crafted an album whose dark melodies are dynamic enough to remain interesting over repeated listening, and still kick your ass into shaking fits on a regular basis.

Answer key:

Mistake 1: How can vintage be brand new, how, I ask, how!?

Mistake 2: $25 is not cheap for a shirt, duh.

Mistake 3 & 4: Urban Outfitters, the only place where you can buy a brand new vintage t-shirt for the low, low cost of $25.