 |
Arts and Crafts | loscampesinos.bandcamp.com
|
· · ·
Romance Is Boring was ranked tenth in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, and was awarded the Daria Morgendorffer Digit for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Pessimism
· · ·
“And so fucking on /
And so fucking forth /
We’ve got your back /
Whatever that’s worth”
The sound of Los Campesinos! is the sound of teen rage curdled into adult resentment. It’s not that the world’s problems don’t have solutions. It’s that the people who are supposed to be in charge have completely abdicated their responsibilities, squabbling among themselves instead of running the damn thing.
It’s 2010, and the Campesinos! are staring down the barrel of a life of decay and decline.
So they are casting their precious youth to the wind, wallowing in hedonism as best they can. Which in practice seems to mean bad romance and worse sex. They are already hurtling headlong down the long slippery slope to obsolescence, screaming all the way. It will be a few more album cycles until they reckon with that particular revelation.
Though since long before they debuted their first single, the mangled janglings have been the chosen style of Campesinos! and kids alike — the band graduated directly from banging pots and pans on grubby linoleum to treating grown-up instruments (including a shrieking string ensemble, and a brass section with all the gravitas of a plastic kazoo) with the same inquisitive kitchen-floor care. They take an appealingly slapdash approach to composition, tottering orchestrations piled on top of cramped, jagged punk-rock rebellion. In the two years since their last album, the Campesinos! have wormed fingers into every crack and prised them open just a little. And with newfound breathing room comes rekindled fervour; fuel to feed the fire of their fury.
But such disarming sloppiness belies a twisted cleverness. Romance Is Boring overflows with anxious wit. The first words you’ll hear are: “Let’s talk about you for a minute”. And they do, for literally a minute, before launching into an entire album of nicotine-stained fuckups: binge-drinking (“I remember being naked to my waist / But not in which direction”), awkward encounters (“I’m sweating off the cheat notes on my thighs / They were for your benefit, not mine”) and sick burns that somehow find the time to be self-deprecating (“If this changed your life, did you have one before?”).
Such burns count among the Campesinos!’ neatest tricks, alongside taking straightforward riffs and knotting around them long lines of vitriol. They find themselves unselfconsciously switching gears, constantly leaping from one idea to the next, sustaining only a narrative thread from moment to moment. Even the comparatively straightforward ‘A Heat Rash In the Shape of the Show Me State’ cannot concentrate on a single time signature for more than a few bars at a time.
“A thousand years in perfect symmetry” rhapsodise the Campesinos! on ‘The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future’, a pre-emptive eulogy soaked in brackish grunge, “so the landscape before you looks just like the edge of the world / But to the left side and the right side / Either way is a crazy golf course”. The song crests in a wave of melodrama, poised to wash away any shallow impression of insincerity Romance Is Boring may have mistakenly imparted. Then, just in case the point hadn’t been drilled in hard enough, the next song bursts in with a rowdy stomp-clap rhythm: “Can we all please just calm the fuck down?”
Everything happens at once for the Campesinos! — wherever they go they’re thrashing their spleens out. Whether sneaking behind the local church, riding the baggage carousel at an airport or buried to their necks on some godforsaken beach with wet sand caking their eyelashes, pangs of anxiety and dread are stamped like an interrobang over their lives. Romance Is Boring tastes of chewed fingernails and secondhand chips, shards of broken glass and shattered glockenspiel ground into gravel, where the most stable through-line is baffling references to soccer.
Settling into a routine is anathema to the Campesinos!, predictability a sign of doom and not comfort. As per the upbeat chorus of that slapping title track:
“You’re pouting in your sleep /
I’m waking still yawning /
We’re proving to each other /
That romance is boring”
Romance is certainly not dead. The Campesinos! would never condescend to such an overrated turn of phrase, would never presume to editorialise a statement of opinion into one of fact. If romance is dead, someone has killed it: through action, like a swift blow to the back of the skull; or through inaction, left to wither in the dark like a forgotten potted potato.
Like all of the pleasures to be sampled on this mortal coil, it has lost its sparkle, its spice exhausted, its once-bright pops of fruity saturation turning swiftly to grey mush.
Better make the best of it while it lasts.