No Blues – Los Campesinos!
Five albums since 2008 is a breakneck pace in this late era
of The Kids and Their Technology and Their Rock Music. Over the same interval, Elbow have released
two studio albums. Ditto The
National. And Camera Obscura. Even the indie prototype for industriousness,
The Wedding Present, have only managed a pair of studio long-players since
2008.
But for Los Campesinos!, five albums it has improbably
been. There has been so much consistent greatness
strewn throughout the first four of these that the band could be forgiven for
coughing up a dud, either previously, or now with newest release No Blues. But there have been no duds, and No Blues is in fact better than its
predecessors, and suddenly one dude at the table is accumulating an enormous
pile of chips. Albeit, in this
particular context, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with luck.
The Welsh band’s actual currency is melody: typically ramshackle and bordering upon
manic, but melody nonetheless. Los
Campesinos! do not create clunkers, or spend long minutes patiently layering
sounds into complex landscapes. They
rather bubble and overflow, with a surfeit of sweetness dressed in casual
threads. And they are witheringly,
haltingly smart.
It is reasonable to assert—and here be it now asserted—that
the diction of this outfit exceeds by many magnitudes that of any other popular
band now in existence. They casually
drop the vocabulary of professors while booming and loping through a catalogue
of breakneck pop songs. Over the years,
there have been so many choice bits, and so little relative acclaim, that the
bits are coming to resemble pearls for swine, and we the listeners—or maybe
They, the Idiot Press—are the ones with the curly tails.
Archetypal Los Campesinos! juju is the force at work behind
leadoff track “For Flotsam,” which marries (again) a winning tune with multiple
rows of clever wordsmithing. There is subtlety and yet there isn’t: the chorus comes first.
Knees
knocking and blood flowing, so
I want you
to know, that I want to.
There may not be a better couplet to capture the band’s
anxious romantic energy. By the second
verse, a buoyant guitar line is buzzing away in the right ear, much of the
other racket for the moment receding behind a wink and a grin:
She says, “If you’re unhappy you
gotta find the cure,”
I prescribe me one more beer,
Beyond that, I am not sure.
The isolated guitar line persists through later chorus
installments, and continues to carry the weight of this first song, right up to
the closing movement when the song itself dwindles behind a nearly a cappella
group vocal recital of the chorus. It
is, all of it, magic.
The thing about the fast-moving songs of rock and pop
is: they are not classically built for
heavy thought lifting. Lyrics and
concepts are not allowed room to linger or sink in. It wasn’t so long ago, in fact, that some moron wrote a thousand words about the latest Frightened Rabbit album and
castigated them for at times trying to be too elegant or evocative in confines
too cramped. Well, nonsense. Then and now.
While “For Flotsam” might not amount to much more than a bashful pop
song, the stakes are about to rise.
Quite a bit, actually, because follow up track “What Death
Leaves Behind,” obviously invokes greater calamities than rejection in a
bar. The pace has not slowed, and while
Subjects Discussed expand to include mortality, there persists a preoccupation
with one’s love. So how, then, to make
the world’s most clever remark about sharing traits in common with he or she? Something like this: “They say you and me / are tautology.” Yes, that about does it.
The soundstage for this second track, meanwhile, is a thing
of great beauty. Synthy elements expand
to include the actual melody, while another roaring guitar line fills and
supports the song from the foundation.
Vocals eventually blossom into a call-and-response revelry. This is strange stuff for a memento mori, but for all of the pop
sensitivities it still succeeds in the raising of existential alarm. With, of course, some further winking—now in
the direction of God-as-radio host:
Long time listener,
First time caller,
No need to remind me
What death leaves behind me.
If one engages in dialogue with the Devine, surely a
conversation with Morrissey cannot be far behind. And “far behind” in this instance means two
tracks later, when Los Campesinos! fire a volley over the quiff with a fairly
ambitious pun. “Cemetary Gaits” occupies
an album position one track earlier than it’s The Queen Is Dead inspiration—surely due to the eagerness of
mischief. Once again, the sounds are
simply lovely: layers of acoustic
guitar, some electronic blips and chimes, and a filtered vocal effect that
sounds an age older. It is gorgeous to
begin with and it eventually grows into something of enormity, including
touches of brass and some cascading background vocals. Oh, and about that pun: “You’ll know us by the way we crawl / you’ll
know us by our cemetery gaits.”
Impossible to repeat without laughing.
One pun in a song aimed at Morrissey, however, is a
slingshot in an artillery battle. The
original song, among the Smiths’ best, was also guilty of being a tad fey. That tendency did not escape notice this time
around: an army of romantically
confounded poets, alas, has its vulnerabilities…
They boast of poets on their side,
but what use will they be if this
comes to a fight?
I glance along the length of pew
and all’s I can think is I want to
undress you.
The remainder of the album hustles on in a, ahem, gait of lurching
speed. Its central shortcoming, as with
its predecessors, is that an entire album of this pace and verbiage can be
overwhelming and exhausting. This is no
fault of its own, surely—there seems to exist no clear path to the brilliance
of Los Campesinos! that doesn’t lead through rarefied air and feats of rapid
assimilation.
But recall now our wonderful digital age. There is plenty of room for the rotation of
these and previous Los Campesinos! songs through our shuffling digital
libraries: so many of these individual
songs pearls; so many of us with curly tails.
The last ten years have witnessed a rather panicky post-Britpop,
post-Radiohead search among the lunatic British music press for the island’s
next Great Rock Band. Arctic Monkeys, Bloc
Party, Editors, the aforementioned Elbow, and a bunch of other far-inferior
candidates have been candled, only to be found immature or altogether rotten. Funny thing, then, that the real thing has
been in front of them the entire time, to deficient acclaim.
Los Campesinos! are the best band in Britain. And one of the best anywhere.
Keepers 1-10
December 2013
