Of all the bands I’ve come to truly love over the last few years, Los Campesinos! has been one of the most problematic to recommend to friends. Their 2008 debut album, Hold on Now, Youngster… hit a very specific wavelength of shout-along post-twee anthemic indie rock so confidently and completely that – well – it became difficult to recommend the album to anyone who wasn’t looking for exactly that sound. And is it the kind of thing you’d even know you were looking for until you heard it, anyway? At times overcaffeinated and bouncing off the walls, at others deceptively maudlin and veering close to over-smart, it was nevertheless a record that always gave 110%, a breakneck ride through the weird wonderful world of seven barely-adults from Cardiff that, OK, you kind of have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy. And don’t get me wrong: I am there, often, and when I am the music is fucking great. I’ve just found that this isn’t the same for everyone.
But, good news: my friends won’t be able to use that excuse much longer.
The band’s “proper” sophomore album, Romance is Boring, has just been released and I’m honestly surprised how spectacularly these guys have managed to balance their sound. The album as a whole sounds a little more centrist, but it’s barely at the expense of losing anything that makes their sound so unique. If anything, they’re just growing up and branching out, but staying true to themselves all the while.
It’s there even in the first few notes of the album, a slight variation on what I call the LC Riff. If you know the band well, you have heard the LC Riff. It’s a fairly simple but memorable melody – usually played on violin but sometimes synths or otherwise – that appears in many variations across the band’s work. It only shows up at the end of Hold on Now, but pops in and out of a good chunk of odds-n-sods collection We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, often late in the song – check out 3:00 into “Ways to Make it Though the Wall” – always slightly different but an unmistakable callback, a motif, a wink to the fans, whatever. It’s here in full force from second one on Romance, immediately welcoming you to familiar territory. But 30 seconds in it takes a turn into new territory, measuring its time and building up to the big release, with Gareth Campesinos! welcoming you to the album with a phrase you never thought you’d hear him say: “Let’s talk about you for a minute”.
Already in this first minute, they’ve spelled out their mission statement. And, OK, Gareth does spend only a literal minute in second-person before returning to his hilariously pessimistic autobiographical sketches, but hey, baby steps. The song soon submerges into feedback, glides around in it for a minute, seems to meander. And you start to wonder if maybe these guys are losing their way already. But then it roars back to life, so goddamned triumphant that it brings along a whole horn section (pay attention to these horns; they’ll be back), one more killer verse from Gareth, and then, yes, a short spoken-word outro, because this is still Los Campesinos, right – and it’s done. As far as opening tracks go, it’s not a barn-burner in the vein of “Death to Los Campesinos!”, but it does set the tone for the rest of the album pretty perfectly.
The next two tracks are the album’s lead singles, and while I’m not sure I would have chosen the same ones (probably because most of my favorite parts of the album hinge on the word “fuck”), they’re more than worthy as catchy gateway drugs for new listeners. The title track in particular has a great dirty southern rock feel to it, another new direction for them. There are actually a lot of neat new flourishes all over the album, no doubt thanks to musical mastermind Tom Campesinos!. There’s the aforementioned horns, the stringy guitar scraps winding under “We’ve Got Your Back”, the blown-out punk fuzz of “Plan A”. Weirdest and most interesting is “I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know” (title aside), a detuned inversion of that LC Riff getting ground around in a thick hyperspeed mash. It’s thrilling stuff. Dunno how they’ll replicate it on stage, but still, thrilling.
It’s great to see how everyone’s stepped up their game here, from Harriet’s violins to Ollie’s drums. Aleks’s presence isn’t as widespread as it used to be - which makes sense given that she’s on her way out of the band - but her contributions are more varied and vital than ever, maybe because of their infrequency. At once sarcastic ice queen on “I Warned You, Do Not Make an Enemy of Me”, judgmental conscience on “A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State” and needling huckster on “Plan A”, she’s become far more than an easy vocal counterpoint, and her presence will be missed.
(Side note: is anyone else really wary of the new lineup? Not that it has anything to do with my hopeless crush on Aleks (well, maybe a bit) or new acquisition Kim Campesinos! personally, but the fact that Gareth’s new vocal counterpart will be his sister places the band dynamic in a fundamentally different light. Like any band with mixed genders and intensely personal lyrics - The Smashing Pumpkins, The xx, hell, Fleetwood Mac - a lot of the fans’ morbid fun comes from speculating on the romantic relationships, whether real or imagined, between the band members, and how those inform our listening experiences. The listener who thinks they must have hooked up has a different experience from the one who thinks he must have a huge crush on her and the one who thinks she must think he has a crush on her and so on. But when you’re talking about two siblings, all this speculation falls away - unless you have a really twisted view of them, which I don’t. Still hoping for the best with Kim, but there’s no denying that the Los Campesinos! of 2011 will be a very different beast.)
But this is also an intensely personal album for Gareth. The word is that most of his lyrical illustrations are only barely fictional, and I don’t think he’s even changed the names of old flames (I can’t believe that the Charlotte to whom he writes letters on “Heat Rash” isn’t the same Charlotte he thanked in the liner notes of We Are Beautiful), yet he doesn’t shy away from details whether hilarious or depressing. Only on “Who Fell Asleep In” does it become a little too much, a slow confessional dirge that’s missing most of the trademark Campesinos humor and vitality. And it’s not a matter of just being slow; by contrast, late-album track “The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future” is hardly fast, but carries such epic weight and emotion (and plenty of Gareth’s trademark oddball character sketches) that it easily becomes one of the band’s best tracks.
In fact, Romance is Boring has one of the best late-album sequences I’ve heard in a good long while. From the off-kilter “I Warned You” to “Heat Rash”, a steel-eyed regret that swells into a towering anthem with the return of those fucking horns, through “The Sea is a Good Place” to proper album climax “This is a Flag. There is No Wind”, a vitriolic shout-along that doubles back to familiar territory without once forgetting all the new ground they’ve tread. Here, after the shouts and the choruses and crescendos, the LC Riff comes rolling back in, ready to send the album out on the same note that ended Hold on Now, Youngster. But then it magnifies and bottoms out, and the band comes roaring back in - “Our friends have put the two of us on suicide watch!” - and our expectations are gloriously upended once again. This shit is exhilarating.
It’s a perfect end to the album, though it is followed by one more track: the fittingly-named “Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State”, which is just Gareth, his glockenspiel and a gloom of guitar feedback. It’s a hugely abrupt comedown from the previous song, but in context it feels important, a lament of personal failure aimed at… maybe one of the girls named on the album, maybe the departing Aleks, maybe all, maybe none (see? It’s fun to theorize). It’s such a downer that I usually want to skip the track - though that just starts the album over again. And I am always fine with that.
So, yes, it gives me great pleasure to say that this is my favorite album of theirs, and so far my favorite album of 2010 - which, in a year already filled with new releases by Spoon, Hot Chip, Gorillaz and Massive Attack, is really saying something. It’s exciting to hear and watch one of your favorite bands really maturing and improving, especially when they produce the kind of sound that speaks to a wider audience - without selling themselves or their fans short. It’s a rare triumph of a (technically) sophomore album, and hopefully just one more step in a long and successful career.
