At some point this year I found out that Hello Sadness is considered to be Los Campesinos! least popular album, and the shock I felt rippled through the entire core of my being. That’s what happens when you spend so much time with an album that you can’t separate it from yourself. Here was a band that established itself with ebullient indie-pop with nods to twee and C-86 going full sad bastard music. Where breakups have always been fertile ground for Gareth Campesinos’ songs, this one goes all in on the misery. It’s also, in my opinion, his best songwriting (in a catalog full of great songs) and the band’s most complete album (in a catalog without a single dud in it) to date. Hello Sadness changed Los Campesinos! trajectory and established that this band was not one to get cozy inside of a formula that worked incredibly well (as illustrated on my write-up for Romance is Boring earlier on this list). You listen to a track like “The Black Bird, The Dark Slope” and you can hear the band really going for it, pushing outside of their comfort zone to deliver a big heavy emotional punch. You get the brattiness of the earlier records on “Songs About Your Girlfriend” and “Baby I Got the Death Rattle,” and you get one of the best LC! songs to date (and my personal favorite) in “By Your Hand.” LC! has always been a little niche to me (in the sense that I don’t know anyone as obsessed with them as I am, but then I get online and I’m like, “Oh, there they are”) but it’s a niche I’m happy to live in.
No comments:
Post a Comment