Day 2: Los Campesinos! – Hold On Now, Youngster…

[Days 1 & 2 were originally posted on my personal blog, "The Unimportant Superstar".]

It only seems right that, while I’m enduring this period of job instability, that I review an album on which the first words are, “Broken down like a war economy…”.  Heh.

So, here’s (in my mind) the simple formula to create Los Campesinos! -  start with a solid foundation of Brit indie-pop.  Crank up the amount of faux-yelling.  Switch back and forth between male and female lead as many times a song as you can handle (easy to do when the band has seven members).  Then add in some pretty smart (I believe the exact word to use would be “cheeky”) lyrics… and voila.  12 tracks of this and you have Los Campesinos! first album (and one of two to be released this year).

I was first exposed to this bunch watching MTV-U one day – a video played that didn’t have the standard band/song name/record label graphic before and after the song.  It was actually so short, at first I thought it was a new Gap commercial (I’ll link to the video at the end of this post, just to show you what I mean).  After doing a little digging online, I found out that the song was “My Year In Lists”… and it really was just a short song.  That short song remains my favorite of the entire disc to this day.  It’s one of the most upbeat depressing songs I’ve heard in a while… and I’m fairly sure it’s been stuck in my head since the initial listen.

There are a couple of other tracks that stuck out for me.  One of the slower tracks, “Knee Deep At ATP” drew me in with some wordplay (call me a nerd, but using punctuation symbols as metaphors just gets my attention for some reason).  Also, I really dig the lyric, “…and when our eyes meet/all that I can read/is “You’re the b-side.”  Ouch.  Honestly… the lyrics are my favorite part of the album in general, because to be frank – the music really isn’t all that unique.  Par for the course when it comes to indie-pop stuff.  “We Are All Accelerated Readers”, and “You, Me, Dancing!” are easily my two other favorites, “Readers” being slow and kind of morose and “Dancing!” being quite the opposite.  “2007: The Year Punk Broke (My Heart)” really ends the album leaving you feel like it was more epic than it really was.

“Hold On Now, Youngster…” definitely has a youthful, snarky attitude about it.  And I think that intrigues me more than anything.  Enough to check out their second album, at any rate.  I think if you’re into bands like Bloc Party or… well, really any other Brit indie-pop group – give LC! a try.

Check out the video to “My Year In Lists” here, and the songs “Knee Deep at the ATP”, “We Are All Accelerated Readers (Live)” and “You!  Me!  Dancing!” here.