The folks in Welsh band Los Campesinos! are smart, clever, funny, and not Welsh. I don’t know what the hell they are. What I can say is that since coming together at Cardiff University in 2006, the band—who are currently seven in number—have released scads of classics with titles like “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives,” “Death to Los Campesinos!,” “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed,” and “We Are All Accelerated Readers.”
They were branded as twee, and have worked hard to escape the label by recording darker songs, but they still sound twee to me—it’s there in the vocals, and in the exuberance of their music. But out of respect to the band, I will happily say they’re not twee and punch anyone in the kisser who says they are. I guess I’ll have to start with myself.
What is undeniable is that the words matter to Los Campesinos!—these are the same people who founded a literary magazine in 2010. What is also undeniable is that their music is happy-making, no matter how dark the subject matter, for the most part because the music is exuberant and ecstatic, with just enough of an edge to let you know they’re in love with rock and roll.
Just check out “Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1.” Or the amped-up guitar rocker “Romance Is Boring,” which, like all of their songs, makes hay with vocals piled upon vocals (Gareth Paisey and Aleksandra Berditchevskaia handled the bulk of the singing duties until the latter left the band in 2011, but there are lots of gang vocals)—and great accents.
The band, which has released seven studio LPs, a pair of live albums, five EPs, and more than two dozen singles since 2007, has a wonderfully eclectic taste in covers. Pavement, Black Flag, Heavenly, Bikini Kill, Deerhoof, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, The Beautiful South—I don’t know why they’re waiting to take on “All the Young Dudes,” but frankly, I’m growing impatient.
And speaking of covers, they include a pair on 2007’s three-song single “The International Tweexcore Underground,” and what makes the single so interesting is that Heavenly’s “C Is the Heavenly Option” and Black Flag’s “Police Story” are there for a reason, mainly because both bands are topics of discussion on band original and A-Side “The International Tweexcore Underground.”
The first thing that needs to be said is that anyone who can nail both Black Flag’s hardcore classic and Heavenly’s divine twee treat has serious range. They throw themselves into the anarchic “Police Story.” They really sound pissed, and “I fought the law and the law won” resigned-but-not-really when they shout/sing the immortal lines “They hate us/We hate them/We can’t win.” And they’re not playing it for laughs, which would be both easy and understandable. Which isn’t to say they’re NOT playing it for laughs—they never give the game away.
“C Is the Heavenly Option” is the perfect twee duet, and the perfect pop confection to boot, and Harriett Coleman’s violin makes for a nice touch, as does the glockenspiel. And when everyone comes in at the end, it’s perfectly, well, heavenly. The vocalists sound like they’re having a wonderful time cramming all those words in left and right, and like the band, all of those words are wonderfully clever.
“The International Tweexcore Underground” is twee frantic, and a kind of dialogue between twee fan Paisey (who wants nothing to do with the likes of Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye) and hardcore type Berditchevskaia (who never cared much about Amelia Fletcher, Calvin Johnson, or Sarah Records).
On Bandcamp, they proudly proclaim themselves “The UK’s first and only emo band,” which is hilarious, but knowing Amelia Fletcher a little, I immediately wrote off to her Swansea Sound/Heavenly/etc. compadre Rob Pursey to ask, “These folks don’t really NOT LIKE Amelia, do they?” He promptly replied, “We took that to be tongue in cheek, it’s all very silly and not offensive. Their homage to “C Is the Heavenly Option” confirms that, I guess. But we’ve never talked to them and don’t know them, really.”
And really, it’s hard to take the sentiments expressed in the song seriously, not with a tagline that goes, “But the International Tweexcore Underground/Will save us all.” Not when we don’t even know what that is! And the song’s chock-full of amusing lines, like
“Getting the laptop fixed by a professional
Doesn’t make me a pawn and stamping harder
On your FX pedal, won’t make you feel any better any more
Oh, you said we’ve gotta bite the hand that feeds
But I was sucking seductively on the fingertips of a civil servant.”
And I always get a chuckle out of the song’s end, which goes:
“Ooh, this city is run by fucking pigs
And though you say you’re my friend
You’re not, you’re one of them
And I never cared about whatever
Sarah Records never meant anything to me
But the International Tweexcore Underground.”
Will save us all.”
Los Campesinos! are a Welsh band who aren’t Welsh, a twee band who are diehard punks, nothing is as it seems with these wags except the joy factor, which is through the bloody roof. You owe it to yourself to buy all of their records and to thrill to the breakneck word spiel of “C Is the Heavenly Option” and to join the Tweexcore Underground, whatever it is.
Will there be courses on bomb-making? Small arms training? Will you have to learn how to take a glockenspiel apart and put it back together again in less than six seconds flat, blindfolded? Memorize the lyrics of every song on the C86 compilation while making C-4?
Is “You! Me! Dancing!” the best song of the New Millennium? It’s possible. And I haven’t even talked about it! It’s Gotterdammerung great, Apocalypse Now pop fantastic, and has this driving beat, and if it doesn’t KILL YOU with happiness, you can count yourself lucky!
Empaths in the mosh pit, stage divers at The Housemartins gig—dig them Swansea sounds!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
