Yes sir, I never tried to be normal

While we can't guarantee that we would immediately take to a new band of a similar genre to Cansei de Ser Sexy, their music and the memories associated with it will always hold a unique place in one's heart - the place reserved for Music You Were a Teenager To. It was in the heat of the MySpace summer when we first encountered their sounds, with tracks like "Music is My Hot Hot Sex", "Meeting Paris Hilton" and of course "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" being nothing at all like anything we'd heard at that point. It was one of the first times we had felt like we'd genuinely discovered an amazing band all by ourselves (of course not true, but it felt like it at the time), and when we caught them live in December 2008 it was also in the peak of the frequency with which we would attend gigs - the gig itself was, as you can imagine, a fiesta of colour, feathers, balloons and hot hot sex. To us, CSS are one of an exclusive set of acts who eased our musical tastes down the path we are still traversing in 2011. Of course, three years doesn't seem that long ago but we're only two decades old ourselves.

While we eagerly awaited their second album, Donkey, it ended up being a bit of a let down. Maybe it was because it came when our music taste had already been well on their drifting way, or maybe it was simply because the first album was such a hard act to follow. There was the odd good track - "Beautiful Song", "Rat is Dead" - but mostly, and sadly, filler. Thankfully we welcomed La Liberación with a clean slate and an open mind, as the third album loses the sometimes-harsh slamming and screeching apparent in its predecessors and replaces it with a more mellow sound. The dance and melodies are still there but the band seem to have taken a step back, adding Afrobeats and samba from their part of the world but being careful not to over do it. "I Love You", thankfully, could've been lifted from their first album and "City Grrl" showcases the idiosyncratic Portuguese English lyrical composition we've always found so endearing. "Hits Me Like a Rock", the lead single, is charming enough but there's gems yet to be plundered into this far more worthy CSS record.