Los Campesinos Return In a Flurry of Dancing

"Romance Is Boring" Anything But A Humdrum.

Los Campesinos
Romance Is Boring
Arts & Crafts
Release Date: Jan 26, 2010

The entirety of Romance Is Boring makes me think of the last 90 seconds of the Cake track “Jolene,” in which John McCrea not only asks you to get down, but he fucking demands it. For the first forty minutes or so of this record, the Campesinos! clan forces you to take notice, get off your ass, put down the acoustic guitar and start dancing. Unlike a lot of recent indie-pop, though, which tries to facilitate this by getting demandingly twee, this is just a fantastic record for the most part which earns the attention it wants, rather than trying to manufacture it.

The tone is set by the opening track, “In Media Res.” Here, not only do LC! remind you why you fell in love with “Death To Los Campesinos!” two summers ago in the first place, but put up notice that they’re an evolved band, with the almost industrial (!) breakdown midway through. This is a trend through a lot of this record; though they’re still the glockenspiel and handclap-happy band they were, they’ve also (time for a critic word) matured considerably in a pretty short space of time.

Don’t worry, though; this isn’t one of those “maturity” experiments that kills everything you dug about them. Rather, it takes the basic fundamentals of LC!’s sound and uses that as a foundation on which to build all manner of new sounds. There’s the punk tinges of tracks like “Plan A” and first single “There Are Listed Buildings,” the strings and feedback on “Coda: A Burn Scar In The Shape Of The Sooner State” and most noticeably, the genre-jumping of “I Warned You Do Not Make An Enemy Of Me.” Even if that last track doesn’t quite gel and some of the ideas are a bit atonal, what works out on this record is what’s going to stick over what doesn’t.

On the note of what does work, Romance features more than a few songs destined to be live staples and discography favorites. The title track is a deliriously fun singalong and proves that Aleks Campesinos’ exit from the band last year didn’t leave any kind of a void; lead singer Gareth’s sister Kim steps in and sounds remarkably like the woman she replaced. “Straight In At 101” could very well go down as “Let’s Get It On” for this year’s indie crowd. Then, there’s “i just sighed. i just sighed, just so you know,” which begins slower than one might be ready for and builds into a gigantic wall of sound by the end. The album’s most accomplished track would be “The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future,” a more somber affair about a ruined young woman trying to put her life back together, which also shows how far this band has come in just the four years they existed.

What’s remarkable about this band, and this record, is the massive leap in quality over their already excellent debut “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed” and the album-that-for-legal-reasons-is-only-an-EP “Hold On There, Youngster.” It’s reassuring to know that change has come to this band for the better, and they’re aware of this. As Gareth sings on “We’ve Got Your Back,” “So fucking on/And so fucking forth/We’ve got your back for whatever that’s worth.” Good to know.