Los Campesinos! - "You! Me! Dancing!" 7"

Los Campesinos! – “You! Me! Dancing!” 7”

Wichita, 2007

Acquired: Los Campesinos Mail Order, New, 2009

Price: £5

I feel like I must have been at every show Los Campesinos! played at the 2008 SXSW. I definitely know I cut in line to get into a day set at Emos and didn’t feel bad about it because no one in line was even paying attention and, besides, I wanted it more. The show was basically magic: cluttered, exuberant magic. During “You! Me! Dancing!” Gareth jumped into the crowd, which on paper seems like a cheap ploy to force audience engagement but it WORKS EVERY SINGLE TIME. “OH MY GOD THE GUY SINGING THE SONG IS HERE AMONGST US PLEBES!” I probably said and loved the band even more. “You! Me! Dancing!” is like THE Los Camp! song. It’s the most towering single from their electric debut Hold On Now, Youngster... and best distills the band’s strengths, which is basically throwing a hundred different influences into a blender and serving up a pop smoothie. 1990s alternative rock in the guitars, Sarah Records songwriting in the clever, occasionally self-effacing lyrics, a genuine understanding of twee pop in all of its majesty without actually being twee pop itself, and A SHITLOAD OF GLOCKENSPIELS. Glockenspiels make it a party, it’s just a fact. Seeing seven early-twentysomething Brits crammed on that tiny stage in Austin is still one of my favorite concert experiences. In hindsight, Gareth Campesinos’ vocals are chirpy and thin compared to his room-commanding pipes on No Blues and Hello Sadness. Maybe the best portrait of the band is a sort of timelapse, side-by-side pairing of “You! Me! Dancing!” and their latest single, “Avocado, Baby” which is both way more in control of itself (although the wild quality of “Dancing!” is part of its charm) but about twice as face-meltingly catchy. I sometimes wonder if people don’t take Los Campesinos! seriously. Like all they think is “Oh, twee pop revival there’s no depth” because this is the stuff I worry about when it comes to bands I adore. As with the Hold Steady and GBV, I get defensive if people slag on Los Camp! Even with an absence of religion, I still found a way to be a zealot.

"You! Me! Dancing!'

"It Started With a Mixx"

And just because, here's the fantastic video for "Avocado, Baby"

Los Campesinos! - "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" 7"

Los Campesinos! – “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives” 7”

Wichita, 2007

Acquired: Los Campesinos Mail Order, New, 2009

Price: £5

 

Have you ever heard a song where you just knew you were going to follow a band to the end of it all? It’s exactly like falling in love, because it is falling in love. There was a moment in 2008 when I looked past this hype machine image of Los Campesinos! that had been planted in my head based solely on the disco ball cover of their Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP and listened to the damn thing and realized that there, in the midst of my indie pop years, it was the most perfect thing I could have possibly heard. Following this band through the years has been one of the great joys in my life, and the only other bands that rouse me on a cohesive gut/heart/head level are Guided by Voices and the Hold Steady. So LC! are in very good company. Watching the band move beyond their playful twee-inspired glee into darker, truer territory has been a treat. That said, “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives” is a total fucking mess of a song, and that is what made me fall so hard. The music is a jumble of things running into each other, and the accented boy/girl vocals feel like they are spelling one another because there are too many lyrics for the songs brisk tempo. It all devolves into chaos, and though it’s a little rough and a little silly, there’s just so much pure bliss that it feels impossible not to love this scrappy group. All of the joy of making music is on display on “You Throw Parties…” and b-side “Don’t Tell Me to do the math(s),” and it’s a special thing, because these humble beginnings are the high watermark of a lot of bands. And compared to the concurrent masterworks of LC!, these two songs sound like the quaint rumblings of 8-year old children fucking around in the family room.  

"We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives"


"Don't Tell Me to do the Math(s)"

Gut Feeling: Los Campesinos! - No Blues

Los Campesinos! – No Blues

Wichita, 2013

 

While I don’t know what it’s actually like to watch a child grow up before your eyes (although, in about four-and-a-half months I’ll strat down that road), I can only imagine it’s something akin to watching Los Campesinos! grow into one of the best bands in the world over the last six years. I don’t even know if that claim is hyperbole. I feel like it might be hyperbole, but I can’t remember the last time I loved a band this much. Waiting for No Blues to drop was like waiting for Christmas morning. Like real Christmas morning when you’re ten years old and you wake up at 3:30 AM and can’t get back to sleep so you stay up watching terrible infomercials until 8 which is the unofficial reasonable time to wake up your parents. The last time I anticipated an album this violently was 2003 (See: High School, Alkaline Trio’s Good Mourning). It’s a tricky thing, waiting with baited breath for an album you are absolutely assured will be outstanding. Anything less would crush my heart. It’s a dangerous way to feel about a band. Considering you can chart Los Campesinos!’s growth over their last four albums, my Nate Silver-esque analysis led me to believe this one would be great. And I wasn’t wrong. The scary thing is that No Blues not only met my expectations, but pulled off things I wasn’t even expecting period.

After the gloominess of Hello Sadness (still one of my favorite break-up albums and favorite Los Campesinos! album to date), Los Camp return to the unadulterated twee pop of their debut EPs and filter it through every trick they’ve learned in their brief career. The one-two punch of the first two tracks—“For Flotsam” and “What Death Leaves Behind Me”—is about the giddiest music you’re going to hear all year. Packed with lush synthesizers, Gareth Campesinos’ trademark tongue-in-cheek misery, and the prettiest music and the hookiest hooks LC! have tossed together to date. Those tracks are so satisfying it’s unreal. The way this band throws so many elements into the mix and somehow makes the cacophony sound like the most controlled, organized thing ever is a miracle. That skill has always been impressive, but in the face of losing the lion’s share of its founding members over the last couple of years, it’s especially miraculous that LC! sound better than ever.

While No Blues has some of the brightest, most upbeat Los Campesinos! tracks since Hold On Now, Youngster (“Avocado, Baby” is about as pure as indie-pop gets these days, it’s so fucking good and catchy I want to fucking scream every time it pops into my headphones. Just listen the guitar riff that plays through that, goddamnit, so subtle but so good), it’s the morose moments that round No Blues into LC!s purest artifact. “Glue Me” has the line “I’ll be gloomy til they glue me in the arms of she who loves me” which is both funny and, with the sad guitars and strings swaying in the background, one of the most moving moments on the record. Watching (or listening, I suppose) to this band mature has been one of the greatest pleasures I’ve ever had as a music lover. Year after year, Los Campesinos! keep making records that are severely fun, meaningful, and built out of pure fucking joy, and these records make my life a bit better than it would be without them. It is an incredibly sentimental notion, but I’m incredibly sentimental about LC! and I will probably weep big crocodile tears whenever they break up.

What I talk about when I talk about Los Campesinos. That’s how I feel when I write up one of my favorite working bands. As soon as the album finds its way into my car stereo and stays there for two months, my drive time is spent thinking up what I could eventually say when I inevitably review it. I’ve been doing this since Los Campesinos! released their debut EP in 2007. I usually think of the band in terms of trajectory but today, in the car as I was driving around listening to Los Camp’s as expected great fifth album, I realized trajectory isn’t right. Trajectory seems to imply a downturn and Los Campesinos! keep getting better with age. 

"What Death Leaves Behind Me"

"Avocado, Baby"

Or fuck it, just listen to the whole album. If you're not hooked by those ethereal backing vox then I don't know what makes you happy and I'm sorry you cannot know joy.