Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Los Campesinos - Komedia
Really, your love for Los Campesinos is going to depend entirely on where you sit on the Indie 1 to 10 scale. Say you’re a 1 - proud owner of Shine compilations 3 and 4 / went to see Oasis at Knebworth / regularly sport a Kooks T-Shirt – you’re probably going to find their twinkling glockenspiels, scratchy guitars and nagging synth lines pretty jarring.
If, however, you’re closer to a 7 or 8 - you know all the staff in Rough Trade by name / Jeffrey Lewis sleeps on your floor when he comes to town / you are in a band (extra point here if you release your own music on hand made 7”s) – Los Campesinos’ brand of righteous indie ire, raggedy arrangements and unabashedly twee stylings will probably appeal a little more.
The Cardiff Uni based septet know a thing or two about this here Indie 1 to 10 scale: ‘International Tweecore Underground’ namechecks a handful of alt.heroes it’s actually OK NOT to like (Black Flag’s Henry Rollins and Fugazi’s Ian Mackaye) and by turns their songs rail against mainstream, NME endorsed indie, misogyny in the music press, the affected keytar posturing of their so-called peers and self-obsessed stars both mirthless and excessively earnest in delivery. Easy targets you might think but there’s enough wit, invention and lyrical twists and turns here to keep you guessing and indeed, chuckling throughout.
Live, their’s is a messy, clattering sound that chucks about violins, keyboards and boy-girl vocals with all the slapdash glee and joyful abandon of a pre-school music group let loose in a guitar shop. And this is no bad thing, for what they lack in polished musicianship they more than make up for with infectious energy and barely concealed delight at finding themselves two weeks into the biggest national tour of their career - their first outing since graduating in June. Eye contact and joyful grins are exchanged across the stage throughout the show and frontman Gareth happily extends his lyrical thrust to the between song banter. Describing the progress of the tour so far, all fine apparently until they hit Birmingham that is when, gasp! a Hard-Fi T-Shirt is spotted amongst the front row!
They dispense with a succession of what sound like mini-anthems in waiting – ‘You and Me Dancing’ eliciting an especially rapturous response - and in a none-more Indie display of solidarity, support act You Say Party We Say Die! join them onstage at the encore for a bout of co-ordinated hand jiving. When 99% of bands can barely crack a smile on stage, let alone choreograph an inter-band boogie you - as Los Campesinos so often do – have to question their motivation. Perhaps they’ve all forgotten this being in a band lark is, like, supposed to be fun?
posted by: Jim Brackpool @ 10:10 PM
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