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Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster...
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"...and I’m not Bonnie Tyler and I’m not Toni Braxton, and this song’s not going to save your relationship – oh, no s*** – and if this sentimental movie marathon has taught us one thing, it’s the opposite of true love is as follows: reality!”
We could fill the whole page with gnomic lyrical pearls from young Gareth Campesinos (yes, oddly, all seven LC!s share the same surname) but it would only give half a clue why Hold On… is so great. Or possibly three-quarters of a clue.
Formed at Cardiff University in 2006, the three girls and four boys ditched academia for life on the road as vexingly literate, ultra-indie, motormouthed tune-manglers, waving an agenda as long as their skinny arms. That agenda is a million-point plan to avoid being another set of Libertines copyists, to shake up music – or shake it down to its indie fundamentals. The words tip the balance.
Hold On… is great, but it’s a qualified success. Los Campesinos! deal in fevered indie-pop – simple guitar riffs bounce through the frequencies, a glockenspiel tickles every song, cooed choruses follow frenetic bursts of energy as Gareth and female foil Aleks exchange lines – and variety’s rare. The opening salvo of ‘Death To Los Campesinos!’, ‘Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats’ and ‘Don’t Tell Me To Do The Math(s)’ sounds like three movements of the same spurned teenage opera. But look at the titles – bow to the force. Inventive playing, and pages and pages of lyrics that somehow mix the considered and apparently spontaneous, make the record endlessly intriguing.
High points pop up with the unexpected ballad ‘Knee Deep At ATP’, as Gareth finds a faded photo of infidelity (“Maybe the lining of a winter’s coat mightn’t be the best place to hide a summer’s secret”), and the pen pal joust of ‘My Year In Lists’ (“Decorating envelopes for foreplay”), its squalling guitars signalling desperate regret. It’s all clever as hell, but cute with it.
They peak late with the dizzy brilliance of single ‘You! Me! Dancing!’ (“It’s all flaming limbs at the front line / Every one of us is twisted by design”) and proud finish of ‘Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks’ with its battle cry, “One blink for ‘yes’, two blinks for ‘no’ / Sweet dreams, sweet cheeks, we leave alone”. Ah, the beaten indie kids – they’ve put up an ecstatic fight.
Matthew Horton
