Los Campesinos
Words by Dan Jude
Los Campesinos polarise. You either think their energetic lo-fi brand of 7-piece power-pop is the tastiest thing to come out of the West Country since Cheddar cheese, or you want to batter their twee glee faces with rusty Tegan and Sarah vinyls. ‘It sounds like a cliché but I’d much rather polarise opinion than have everybody agree that we’re OK but nobody’s favourite’, singer/glockenspieler Gareth explains. ‘I can completely empathise why people wouldn’t like our music, but like I say I would much rather that people feel strongly about it in either a positive or a negative way.’
So what is it that cuts public opinion so sharply on Los Campesinos? Perhaps it’s their heart-on-your-sleeve-verging-on-My-Chemical-Romance-pseudo-emo lyrics and song-titles, as evidenced when Gareth sings about the time ‘I walked into the room to see my ex-girfriend / Who by the way I’m still in love with / Sucking the face of some pretty boy / With my favourite band’s most popular song in the background’ in the painfully long-titled ‘It’s Never That Easy Though Is It? (Songs For the Other Kurt)’. If you’re not a sucker for schmaltzy titles, it’s unlikely you’ll be overly fond of the following track ‘Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown’ either.
Or perhaps it’s their inescapable twee-ness. ‘I think it’s our own fault that we got labelled as twee - we used it quite happily and then everybody started to use it. Perhaps in hindsight we shouldn’t have been quite so keen to do that’ Gareth muses. But once you get past the Belle & Sebastian-esque quaintness to Los Campesinos, there is a lot of substance therein. Rousing ethereal lo-fi melodies fuse with an explosive Arcade Fire-inspired big-band sound to create songs that are at once understated and charming, and at the same time plucky, daring and experimental.
They’re also churning out records faster than Seabiscuit, and with their debut album only 5 months old they’re already putting out another 10-track record. ‘Personally we don’t consider it to be an album, although most people will probably call it an album.’ So what the bejesus is it then? ‘Well…it comes in a shallow shoe box and it’s got a poster with it and a 30 page guide – there’s no way that anybody’s going to make any money out of it but it’s what we wanted to do. We’re not in a band make money, we’re together to make music we’re proud of.’
Integrity - alive and kicking inside the beating hearts of Los Campesinos. ‘Although we’re in a band we don’t really feel like we are’ Gareth humbly declares. ‘We’ve remained music fans rather than people that are in a band, and I think that helps keep our feet on the ground and helps keep us decent people.’ Decent people and beautifully crafted indie-pop nuggets. What more could you want from a band? Aside from a name that rolls off the tongue easier than Red Lorry Yellow Lorry Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, very little. Very little indeed.
Posted Thu, December 04, 2008
Comments on Los Campesinos
Um, also, aren’t Los Campesinos from Cardiiff, *Wales*? I think the “West Country” refers to the South West of *England*. Nothing to do with Cheddar and Somerset, surely?
Posted by: loothi | 14/12/2008 at 21:04
They met at Cardiff uni and some of them are Cardiffians. But there’s seven of them. And some of them come from the ‘west country’, Bristol being their nearest major city…
Posted by: Stereodista | 15/01/2009 at 22:52