Los Campesinos: We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
By Jordan Jacks /// published in the December 2008 issue
Brian Wilson once said that he wrote songs for people to pray to; Barry White often remarked that his songs were for making babies. Listening to Los Campesinos! won’t make you pray, and it won’t put you in any position to get pregnant. I’m not exactly sure what you’re supposed to do while listening to their new record, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, other than sit in front of a computer reading the lyrics and dodging pop-up-ads for Disney-princess quizzes. Long live rock ‘n roll.
Like their tourmates Titus Andronicus, Los Campesinos! belong to that group of hyper-literate, hyperactive new bands that overstuff rushed, wordy verses and choruses into punky little songs. Think The Decemberists with amps and a faster metronome, or The Hold Steady if they weren’t old. Los Campesinos!‘s songs are maximalist lyrically and musically, with verses full of ironic, detailed minutiae — they’ve been called “livejournal rock” — overlaid on hooky chamber punk. There are seven people in the band and two of them play violin and glockenspiel. They have a song called “International Tweexcore Underground.” It’s mocking, but still, they said “tweexcore.” It’s loud music for sensitive people who may also be irritating.
It’s for young people, too. The band exudes youth, from the excited punctuation of their name to the album titles (first album: Hold On There, Youngster), to the lyrics, which are clever and exuberant, but often so self-conscious and self-satisfied as to be almost unbearably precious. How can you get away with titling a song “Miserabilia” and including in its lyrics “Shout at the world because the world doesn’t love you! /
Lower yourself because you know that you’ll have to!” unless you are Morrissey? Or about “extorting money from your parents” and writing novellas (“The End of the Asterisk”)? Aren’t you pleased with yourself?
This album is relentlessly, overly clever. The songs’ lyrical earnestness, delivered with a knowing wink, is an attempt at the album title’s world-weariness, and the propellant is supposed to be that they’re sung over these huge, sprawling, Spector-gone-punk arrangements, all Boss and guitar riffs and synth-lines and violins. When it works, as in the magnificent title track (the whole group, over a charging synth riff and violins, screams “He’s got his teeth fixed/ I’m gonna break them” and “We kid ourselves there’s future in the fucking/ But there is no fucking future,” and it is percussive, varied, and awesome), it really works. It makes me want to beat the shit out of someone with a hardcover copy of a Saul Bellow novel.
When it doesn’t, though, when the rhythms are even slightly off, or when the hook isn’t quite brilliant, the balance dissolves. The problem with Los Campesinos! is that their trick has to be perfect to work, and the band’s music often relies more on enthusiasm than differentiation. The big, anthemic songs structured around a paired lead-guitar/synth ostinato pattern start to sound the same after a while (see: “Ways to Make It Through the Wall,” “The Last Asterisk”), and the curious music/lyric ratio of irony and exuberance, youth and age, is lost. The songs just seem overreaching and ridiculous, both lyrically and musically. They’re too eager to please to be pleasing.
Some of the blame can go to producer John Goodmanson, whose flat, trebly mix (all high-hat and lead guitar) robs these songs of much of the bass punch they probably have live. But the central problem here is a lack of variation, of space to let these songs breathe. There’s just too much — too much glockenspiel, too much violin, too much winking. The album’s two most interesting points are the sound collage “Between an Erupting Earth and an Exploding Sky” and half-acoustic ballad “Heartswells/Pacific Daylight Time” because their change in tempo and mood is shocking, allowing the songs around them (“We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed” and “Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown”) to gain distinction. When you’re listening to a band that can title a song “This Is How You Spell ‘HAHAHA I’ve Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-romantics,’” you need that space.
Smart, original, and trying entirely too hard, Los Campesinos! makes me yearn for the days when people started rock bands because they couldn’t read.
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