Los Campesinos! Silly! Yet serious!
The band is full of great pop hooks and snarky lyrics.
Published Feb. 10, 2009
Los Campesinos!, an indie rock band of college kids from Cardiff, Wales, released two full albums in 2008. The first, Hold On Now, Youngster..., is one of the best and most fully realized indie debuts of the decade (it was also MOVE's No. 1 album of 2008). At the surface, the album is just a sugar-rush indie album with twee leanings (see: awful doodles on the album cover), but at its core it reveals a band that features a few of the most singular and inventive minds in contemporary indie.
At the forefront is lyricist and vocalist Gareth Campesinos! (all band members have stage last names on the Ramones tip), a post-LiveJournal lyricist who is more in touch with our generation of Internet over-sharing and blog verbosity than maybe anyone in music. Some find Gareth's screeds and harsh singing voice melodramatic and overly silly. But that's because the idea that teen drama is simultaneously silly and dead-serious emo is basically the point of Los Campesinos!
Gareth's humor and wit are unmatched, and he takes on our generation's ridiculous histrionics by lovingly mocking himself ("And I spent the last seven years/ Perched on the edge of my bed/ Scratching 'I am incredibly sincere' into my forearms") as much as he does others (actual song name example: "This is How You Spell 'Hahaha, We Destroyed the Hopes and the Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics'").
The whole thing -- wordy titles, snarky lyrics, great pop hooks -- is very Fall Out Boy, if Pete Wentz's major influences were Pavement and Yo La Tengo. But, similar to when Fall Out Boy cut through the garbage-sludge of Nickelback and Audioslave with "Sugar, We're Going Down," Los Campesinos! have positioned themselves as the antidote to contemporary British indie, the anti-Glasvegas/Bloc Party/Kaiser Chiefs, etc. This is intentional, bassist Ellen Campesinos! says.
"We've always kind of said that the idea behind the band was to make music that we weren't hearing when we went out to mainstream places," Ellen says. "The indie nightclubs would play the same things every week, and it kind of was NME-centric bands -- and I don't think there's anything wrong with that, there are tons of NME-centric bands that I like -- but it always felt like there wasn't any new music to discover."
The band made it off the ground fairly quickly (after about eight shows, Ellen estimates) when Los Campesinos! posted their demos to the part-Pitchfork, part-MySpace Web site Drowned in Sound. They eventually got an overture from an Australian label before they landed with Wichita in Europe and Arts & Crafts in North America.
"We started getting all this positive feedback ... and we started to think, 'Oh, dear. Kind of scary,'" Ellen says. "And it's almost like, it has turned into this thing that has overtaken our own goals. Our goals were (just) to be playing shows outside of Cardiff."
For their second album in 2008, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, the band decided to limit the run to under 10,000 copies (forever) and package it in the style of a compartmentalized Japanese bento box, along with an (endearingly fun) DVD, a zine, pins and a poster. It was a philosophical choice.
"With the idea that you can download things and steal our music -- which is fine because we all download music -- (we wanted) something tangible," Ellen says. "You get something that is just a little bit special, and that appealed to us -- creating something around the record."