Los Campesinos!
Los Campesinos!, the youthful, ultra-energetic indie-pop band from Cardiff, Wales, launches its U.S. tour behind recently released We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed here in Philly. We caught up with singer Gareth Campesinos for Review the Reviews, wherein we read excerpts from album reviews and get the reaction of the reviewed.
“As it happens, a nastier, crankier Los Campesinos! actually turns out to be quite a lot of fun. Come the third song, the title track, [Gareth’s] already vomited in a Mexican restaurant, vomited by a football pitch, promised to break someone’s teeth, wished to die by heart attack and collapsed in tears into an ex-girlfriend’s naked breasts.”
“I’ve actually read that whole review and it’s quite lovely. I write the lyrics and it’s very flattering when people do make the effort to listen to them. Often, people will take the music at face value and say, ‘Oh, they sound so happy!’ whereas lyrically it’s not particularly happy most of the time. Those first three songs distilled into that sentence, it does make me sound a bit more deranged than I actually am. But it’s a great review.”
“In under two years this Welsh punk sextet has matured/devolved from tromping over their pansexual alienation like so many glockenspiel-wielding grape dancers to enacting ‘miserabilia’ about how unfulfilling it is to get on your knees next to a urinal.”
“That’s Robert Christgau, isn’t it? He’s quite a famous critic. Well, first off, he’s called us a sextet and there’s seven of us, so that’s very poor, so really there’s no need for anybody to read any further than that. I looked at his website recently and he is very much ... it’s sort of overintellectualized. But it sounds reasonably positive, despite the fact that he’s killed one of us off.”
“The band employs full jurisdiction over what could have turned out to be a bunch of sloppy, recalcitrant songs, considering their multiplex equation of unisonous hollering, co-educational harmonizing, scattershot drumming, and wiggly guitar worked over thrumming bass lines.”
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