Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring
Wales hipsters trade in clever optimism for clever heartbreak.
Los Campesinos! made their high-energy debut two years ago with a pair of albums about six months apart: Hold on Now, Youngster… and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. These immediately made them critical darlings of the indie press, showing off both exciting enthusiasm — Youngster was an explosion of pop-rock-punk couplets, clever to the core — and a good sense of the possibilities of pathos available in pop songwriting — Beautiful was a much more tortured statement of the longing and loss that is the flip-side of the falling-in-love that was chronicled on their first disk, and a very strong pairing with their initial offering. Plus, it was two albums in quick succession. Two albums in a year? Who does that anymore?
So the jury was out on what’d they do for a sophomore excursion. A return to the manic energy and musically-adventurous form of Youngster, or a continuation of the more dismal Beautiful? We got our first hints when they released a cut off their new project on their website late last year, titled “The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future”. It was a brooding, melancholic track, about longing and a troublesome relationship, with lots of watery imagery and a good shouty ending.
The new album, Romance is Boring, dropped on the 26th, and, while that initial glimpse was somewhat accurate, it fails to actually present a complete idea of what the album’s all about. Instead of picking between either of the two possibilities offered by their first two albums, they go harsh.
Los Campesinos!’s songs had, until this point, been marked by a measured gloss. Although busy and stuffed with instrumentation, they generally were somewhat clean. On Romance is Boring, they muddy up their sound, with the lyrics shouted as often as not, the guitars shredding into fuzz at points, and the entire exercise revealing the turmoil of the singer not just in the biting lyrics but the music as well.
The bass is more prominent (noticeably so on “There Are Listed Buildings”), and Gareth Campesinos! continues to be taking the lead on vocals, as compared to their first album, which had him sharing vocal duties more equally with the now-absent Aleks Campesinos!. “Plan A” is a manic explosion, the horns going crazy, the guitars all on overdrive, and practically every line in the verses shouted and the choruses topped with the girls singing in falsetto above Gareth — and yet it works just fine.
Not everything fits. “Who Fell Asleep”, although a fine song in its own right, doesn’t fit into the album, its vaguely country-twangy-loopy guitar out of sync with the rest of the songs. And there’s the constant complaint about Los Campesinos!’s songwriting: its wordplay can sometimes obscure itself with its own brilliant wit.
Overall, the album gives a sense of a band still trying to nail down exactly how they want to proceed. The album doesn’t fit perfectly cohesively, but it’s an aggressive statement of intent, and further solidifies Los Campesinos!’s position at the forefront of indie rock.
Spoon – Transference
The kings of minimalism go even more stripped-down.
Spoon are comparatively old men on the indie block, having been started back in 1993. Compared to Los Campesinos!, which constantly experiments with more instruments and consists of seven members, Spoon is a standard 4-piece, and has been consistently trimming back their sound over the years, becoming the recognized lords of deliberate, crafted, rattling indie rock.
The latest Spoon offering, Transference, starts off with a song with a giveaway of a title: “Before Destruction”. The first minute sounds like it was recorded in someone’s bathroom, until it snaps into production-quality sound. But there’s no major shift of style. Whereas Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, their previous album (2007), was Spoon at their most expressive, painting with broad musical strokes, here Spoon explores the bare minimums of what they can get away with. In fact, this opening song nearly over-promises what’s coming, with honest-to-goodness chorus parts near the end.
They won’t be that layered again throughout. Rarely does the music spread beyond vocals, guitar or bass, banged-out piano, and drums, swapping in and out as needed and never a second more than absolutely what they want. Several songs just full-stop in the middle of what sounds like a third verse — they just decided they’d said enough and that was that for that song! On to the next. No long setups, no long wind-downs. The overriding philosophy appears to be: get in, do it, get out again.
The album is at its strongest early on, with the trifecta of “The Mystery Zone”, “Who Makes Your Money”, and the album’s first single “Written In Reverse”. Spoon doesn’t sink to the same minimalist levels that mumblecore darlings The xx do — the lead singer Britt Daniel’s vocals are always audible and front-and-center, if the meaning is not always entirely transparent. But there’s no denying that this is a band who, after exploring the fringes of mainstream rock and roll on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, have consciously decided to return to their roots in minimalist rock.
The balladic tendencies of Spoon crop up near the close of the album, with the relatively expansive tracks “Goodnight Laura” and “Out Go The Lights” allowing Daniel to exercise his voice in less destructive ways. They follow it up with “Got Nuffin”, a rattling, claptrap ramble from the 2009 EP of the same name, and close out the album with the odd “Nobody Gets Me But You”, with electronic drums and strange little Casio keyboard-esque flourishes.
With Transference, Spoon turns away from the experimentation and expansiveness of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and returns to music as minimalist as the 2001 album Girls Can Tell, and it’s glorious, revealing just how much can be done with just a little bit.
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