Sunday 2 November 2008

Los Campesinos (Fact magazine online)


Young beautiful and doomed.


Listening to ‘We Are Beautiful...’ is the audio equivalent of a hedonistic tea party, where the lime jelly has been spiked and the kids have too much fizzy pop.

Los Campesinos!, pioneers of welsh ‘Tweexcore’, blend fast paced melodic anthems with Biting vocal delivery. The seven piece can’t avoid comparison to the likes of Canadian behemoths Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire.
With sweet and sour juxtaposition of the male/ female lead vocals, delightful harmonies that drown in waves of soaring guitars and strings to reach their uplifting climax. However, the formula lacks versatility and I can’t explicitly pick out anything that marks this album out as a change of direction from their previous efforts.
The record is peppered with lyrical content exploring drunken phone calls to ex lovers, masturbation and insecurities, the average issues of attractive but tragic young adults.
No singles are to be released from the record, and its distribution is limited, perhaps an intentional obstacle in order to prevent the likes of Fearne Cotton getting their grubby little mitts on them.
Lack of promotion and obscure themes aside, the Lyrical ambiguity finds resonance with an audience’ in fact the line ‘Collected scabs in lockets/ Hung them round our necks like nooses’ literally reminded me of a girl at school who use to wear her boyfriend’s randomly discarded teeth as pieces of jewellery. Cute.

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