Album Review: The Strumbellas - Hope

The Strumbellas want us to grab our troubles by the waist and dance them into the goddamn floor.

On third album Hope the Canadian six-piece does its bit to help us along. With 11 twangy, singalong pop-folk songs, the album is fun, captivating and more diverse than you might expect, ranging from the alt-country dirge The Hired Band with its dirty horns and wistful melody, to the new romantic flavour of Wars, to the Polyphonic Spree-worthy ebullience and album-defining hook of Shovels &  Dirt: "I got a head full of darkness, and darkness is good/'Cause if we all die young then we don't get hurt."