Arts & Crafts
Sticking Fingers into Sockets Los Campesinos!’ July 2007 EP was like a torrid summer fling. The eclectic instrumentation caught your ear — all glockenspiels hand claps gang vocals and giddy simple melodies. Then when you sat down with it you realized you had a lot in common. Every song on the six-track disc was a fond satire of pop music and people who listen to it — like Of Montreal but on purpose. When it finally ended it wasn’t because you got sick of each other had a fight or suddenly discovered a previously unmentioned boyfriend. You gently parted ways as if you’d both agreed upon the exact date in advance with a smile and a half-sincere promise to reunite in a few months.
Like brown-haired girls with summer dresses and spontaneous streaks a band’s early charm too often betrays them and their first full-length collapses under the traits that were initially so appealing. With Los Campesinos! the potential tragic flaw was their wit. An ironic self-reflexive sending up of indie pop tropes might work for six songs but double that and there’s a danger of that wittiness proving empty. It’s almost better to give up hope of a second infatuation and just remember the summer.
On the rare occasions first impressions can be trusted however the joy of re-connection is visceral. Hold On Now Youngster is one of these happy exceptions. The album opens with all the playfulness of Sockets intact the first few tracks about robots the Internet and Spiderman perfectly recalling those first few moments of your chance encounter. As it progresses though the material begins to delve into the romantic angst of recent pop music mercifully handled with the same ironic tone. On “Knees Deep at ATP” Gareth and Aleksandra Campesinos! croon “and for each correctly/ used apostrophe/ I could feel my heart sink/ inside my chest in front of me.”
What their increased breadth of material importantly points out is that Los Campesinos! support all of their silliness Internet meme references and enthusiast-as-artist approach to music-making with intelligence. The last track on the album — a bonus song titled “2007 the Year Punk Broke (My Heart)” — astutely summarizes the whole experience. It begins simply. Drums guitar and violin gradually build into the expected pop melody. A couple of quick verses sincerely describe an emotional connection with a specific type of music. The melody loops a few more times tempo steadily increasing for several seconds before breaking into the most complex harmony on the album. Then it collapses into a near wall-of-sound the violin and glockenspiel still distinguishable belting out that central melody over and over — sober hopeful and excited. And it’s hard not to think of summer.
