Los Campesinos! – London Relentless Garage

October 28, 2009

I often think about what it would be like to be in a band. I imagine myself being obsessed with it, fantasising about setlists and the ordering of releases, the artwork, re-reading the lyrics over and over to make sure my fans could grab at them and write them on their hands. I think about the image of them singing back these perfectly-nuanced lyrics, dancing; I wonder if everything else is just an in-road to this moment.

Los Campesinos! are there. I’m not sure whether they’ve done it in such a perfectionist way, or whether their music and imagery just flows from them effortlessly only to be tweaked and made more pristine incidentally. It doesn’t matter.

There’s no more complete band around than this Cardiff lot. There we go. It’s their hyper-consciousness that makes them so easy to fall in love with. Not only do they possess glimmering and interestingly-arranged songs, but an all-in live show to go. The crowd don’t let up and it’s an all-dancing, all-sweating spectacular at the Relentless Garage tonight. The band are out in the crowd, interspersing their giddying songs with back-stories to treasure. It’s how I’d imagine it should be.

Each song of theirs opens with something ultra-distinctive. Take the slowed waa on ‘Death To Los Campesinos!’, or the immense feedback pre-ambling their flagship spectacular, ‘You! Me! Dancing!’. There’s dense and fast in ‘Ways To Make It Through The Wall’, which disguises its “a room full of vacuum, a room full of air look the same”-desolation almost as if it’s not there. While there’s certainly lots going on in this band’s eight-person clever-party, they’re no kitchen sink – there’re contrasts between sparse and feverish, and each part is played with such precise angriness that I’m part of the whole.

And the other reason why my band would be exactly like Los Campesinos!? Because I’d want to hear 600-odd people shouting “Oh, we kid ourselves, there’s future in the fucking/But there is no fucking future” straight back at me. To be reassured that there are that many literate people who’d buy into my extravagant eloquence.

The new material from upcoming third album Romance Is Boring unsurprisingly impresses too, with the relatively pared down ‘There Are Listed Buildings’ showing off their technical whizzery with some stonking guitar work. New member Kim Campesinos! replaces back-to-her-studies Aleks seamlessly, too, as each song’s evolution runs free through the blanket of what seems like thousands of instruments rising simultaneously from the dead. It’s like they’re singing from the darkest, most pedantic, erudite corner of my brain and I’m bathing in it.

There’s no superlative enough for Los Campesinos! – I want their 7-inches, I want to be them, I want to write their lyrics on my face. It’s anarchy, and it’s catching.