I have seen the future of indie-post-DIY-pop-earnest-power-garage-bubblegum-blogbands, and its name is Los Campesinos!
How to not be charmed by this band? The members all identify themselves, Ramones-style, with the surname Campesinos! (Yes, that’s including the exclamation point.) They tell their fans via Myspace that there’ll be no gigs for a while because “we all have hella exams at the moment.” They write songs that re-imagine a college punch party as the scene of a bloodbath, confess they can’t dance, and admit cheerfully to “working on our attitude.”
We stand now at the precious moment wherein any “hype” surrounding this band exists purely on the blogs of giddy music fans—predominantly located in the United Kingdom, to boot. There’s no vacuous, knee-jerk backlash or online music magazine essays about the importance of their widely-circulated-online demo in a post-Clay Your Hands Say Yeah era. Yet.
That is to say, there’s still time to run around spouting your silly exuberance for this brilliantly silly, exuberant band, and be the only one who knows what you’re talking about. Why they’ve eluded the backpack patch ubiquity of, for instance, Tokyo Police Club, I have no idea. Their debut EP, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, came out July 3 on Canadian label Arts&Crafts. This follows the March release of single “You! Me! Dancing!” and June release of double-A-sided single “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives/ Don’t Tell me To Do The Math(s),” both on Wichita. (All of these songs appear on the EP.)
I’ve been spouting my own silly exuberance with relish. This band makes me feel good. They came out of nowhere, there’s a genuine whiff of mystery around them, and they sound so good in a foursquare, non-ironic way. I’ve followed each of their three releases as they happened, scoured the Web for tracks, and, umm, ordered the vinyl from the UK. (In the process learning what “12 pounds sterling” is.)
This band from Cardiff, Wales—who all met at University there and pulled the band together last year—will make their American live debut at some Chicago festival called Lollapalooza. Then comes their American club debut on August 9 at the Mercury Lounge in New York City. So you have approximately that much time before the first wave of fandom ends and it becomes possible to mock the newbies.
If you’re reading this review after that date, God help you.
All but one of these songs has been freely available for months online for those who like picking through British music blogs and BBC Web pages. So it’s hard to hear “Sticking Fingers” as a singular artistic statement rather than a hodgepodge collection of the songs the band had lying about—but I see no reason to care about that in the slightest. It is a great, euphoric listen, with hardly a moment in its august 16-minute run time that doesn’t hit the mark squarely.
This sounds to me almost like an electrified, indie Welsh incarnation of the “big band” sound (his term) that Bob Dylan got during the Rolling Thunder period. There’s violin, glockenspeil, something called “melody horn,” two guitarists, call-and-response vocals, group choruses, and three band members who take stabs at the keyboards. This shouldn’t be overstated, however; the most prominent distinguishing features are deadly melodies and the pinprick, hooky riffing provided by either Neil Campesinos! or Tom Campesinos! on guitar.
It’s just such good fun. Their chef de petite oeuvre is “You! Me! Dancing!” the song that circulated online in 2006 and was re-recorded, under the production of Broken Social Scene’s Dave Newfeld. Newfeld’s emergence to produce both “Sticking Fingers Into Sockets” and an LP the band plans to record while in America gives the band its requisite indie-star-loves-us name-checkability, but he indeed seems a good choice to wrangle this seven-headed band in the studio. His producing touch is appropriately light—no psychedelic soundscapes suddenly emerge to cloud the band’s sound—but the mix sounds sloppy at times.
Included is a revelatory cover of Pavement’s non-LP relic “Frontwards,” which happens to be one of my very favorite songs. Like many indie rock fans from the ‘90s, my first listen to this song came on the two-disc re-release of Slanted and Enchanted. Now, one imagines, the composition will enter many fifth generation iPods for the first time via this rendition. Hearing Los Campesinos! translate it into their giddy stomp, I closed my eyes and grinned deliriously. It felt like a present just for me (and not in a dangerous, mentally-ill-red-flag way.)
