Belle and Sebastian

Tigermilk

If fey indie is your thing, then no one does it better than Belle and Sebastian. They may be twee, but B&S’s Stuart Murdoch has an eye for the type of sharp lyricism which made Morrissey so famous. N.B. Make sure you specify that your copy of Tigermilk is a rare original issue, otherwise people will laugh at your pathetic attempt to become part of the ‘new miserable’. Snobs, us?

Sample miserable lyric:

"A family’s like a loaded gun / You point it in the wrong direction / Someone’s going to get killed" from ‘I Could Be Dreaming’

See also:

Arab Strap’s Elephant Shoe – imagine Shane MacGowan mumbling the poetry of Leonard Cohen in a thick Scottish accent

Nick Cave

Murder Ballads

Why not get all that anger and hatred out of your system and write an album of songs about killing people? Nick Cave did. Mind you, it doesn’t seem to have made him any happier. Nevertheless, if Murder Ballads fails to simultaneously shock and send shivers down your spine, you probably have no emotional capacity whatsoever. For a future miserablist, this is a bad thing.

Sample miserable lyric:

"And I kissed her goodbye / said oh beauty must die / and I lay down and planted a rose between her teeth" from 'Where The Wild Roses Grow'

See also:

If lyrical murder is your thing, look no further than the well known genre 'Norwegian Death Metal': violence on vinyl has never sounded so genuinely frightening.

Eels

Beautiful Freak

Eels songwriter E has had more than his fair share of personal tragedy, and his band's debut album chronicles these emotions in often painfully raw detail. Interesting footnote: The title track was dedicated E’s then girlfriend, who left him very soon afterwards – apparently "beautiful freak" wasn’t really her idea of a term of endearment.

Sample miserable lyric:

"Turn the ugly light off God / Don’t want to see my face / Every day it will betray me" – from ‘Flower’

See also:

Eels’ second album Daisies of the Galaxy, containing the most songs about death on one record…ever

Joy Division

Closer

Joy Division's stripped-down sound provided the ideal focus for Ian Curtis's poetic lyricism and unmistakable vocals. Curtis's tragic suicide at the age of twenty four lent the music an unerring poignancy, making Joy Division's already bleak worldview seem all the more desolate.

Sample miserable lyric:

"Listen to the silence, let it ring on / Eyes, dark grey lenses, frightened of the sun / We would have a fine time living in the night / Left to blind destruction, waiting for our sight" - from 'Transmission'

See also:

Peter Hook's low-slung basslines can be traced through New Order and Monaco, and Barney Sumner's rather weedy vocals heard with New Order and Electronic.

Nirvana

Nevermind

I once lent a copy of this record to my RE teacher, and he was genuinely frightened by it. Maybe it was the combination of Kurt Cobain's coarse lyrical self-hatred, the guitar driven wall of sound, and the sheer force of the vocal performance. Or perhaps he's just more a Cliff Richard kinda man.

Sample miserable lyric:

 "I'm so happy / Cos today I found my friends / They're in my head / I'm so ugly / That's OK cos so are you" - 'Lithium'

See also:

The Pixies, to whom Kurt Cobain admitted he owed rather a large amount of inspiration.

Radiohead

OK Computer

The men of unsurpassed misery deliver a third album which is initially as alienating as Thom Yorke professes to feel. Yet somehow the understated beauty of 'No Surprises' and 'Paranoid Android' (a post-modern answer to 'Bohemian Rhapsody', if ever there was one) have managed to slip into the nation's consciousness, helping to make this one of the most important - and depressing - albums of the decade.

Sample miserable lyric:

 "If I am king you will be first against the wall / and your opinion which is of no consequence at all" - from 'Paranoid Android'

See also:

New album Kid A - all the misery of the previous records, but without any tunes to get in the way.

The Smiths

Singles

No one does misery quite like Morrissey. The soundtrack of a thousand bedsits in the mid-eighties, The Smiths have never been paralleled in their knack for a killer riff matched with lyrics which could make the most hardened social outcast cry. Just look at the song titles: "Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now", "Panic", "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me". Feeling lonely yet?

Sample miserable lyric:

"There’s a club if you’d like to go / You could meet somebody who really loves you / So you go and you stand on your own / and you leave on your own / and you go home / and you cry and you want to die" from "How Soon Is Now?"

See also:

Britpop stragglers who sound nothing like the Smiths, no, really, Gene, with ‘95’s Olympian

Tindersticks

tindersticks

Settle yourself down in an isolated bar, drown your sorrows in whisky, and put Tindersticks on the jukebox. Guaranteed depression within half and hour, or your money back. Stuart Staples sings like the weight of the world is upon him, lovingly accompanied by sweeping violins and tinkling piano. Nowhere is their brand of melancholy so beautiful than on the spine-chilling monologue "My Sister".

Sample miserable lyric:

"Do you ever wonder what’s inside that keeps us together / Do you ever want to take that knife and discover" – ‘Snowy in F# Minor’

See also:

Leonard Cohen, the miserablist's equivalent to Barry White

Travis

The Man Who

While Good Feeling saw them labelled as the frontrunners in the NME’s ‘New Grave’ scene, with follow up The Man Who, Travis found their niche as the unhappy happy people of pop. Named after a book about schizophrenia, the album’s deceptively hummable singles hid a darker lyrical side about getting old, getting scared, and getting rained on.

Sample miserable lyric:

"It’s Saturday night / and your friends are all out / and you’re feeling like shit / cause they never call you / no they never call you…" from "Blue Flashing Light"

See also:

Debut from fellow angelic Scots Geneva, Further