Los Campesinos!

Love’s a bitch, isn’t it? Especially for the sensitive cardigan-wearing types like myself, of course. You know us, the slightly limp-wristed-but-yet-definitely-straight-because-we-like-women-way-more-than-is-healthy brigade of quasi-cultured emotional people, who spend ages trying to find a girl who’s mental enough to be interested before squeezing the life out of her in a self-sabotaging ‘I-must-tell-you-everything’ mission, bruised by an end result of being caught up in romance’s sick sense of humour which leaves us more alone than before the relationship somehow, moaning to anyone who’ll listen because we trust people immediately without thinking about how terrible our probably drunken admissions of ‘Dear Diary’-style ‘I love her, this is all so terrible’ and such like sound to anyone in earshot. We also speak in long sentences and write self-involved music reviews, and take it personally when we make you a mix CD and there’s a track on it you don’t particularly like. If this isn’t you, you’re a proper man. Have a beer and enjoy yourself.

And then Los Campesinos! come along, who people like myself can relate to. For years, they’ve provided self-brutalising accounts from the tangled webs weaved by failed relationships, being ‘beautiful’ and ‘doomed’ and making it all better, an audio hug from a talented Welsh troupe of diverse, often uncompromisingly brash as often as they are thoughtful and loving in saccharine sweet melodies. They get me. We get the prettiest girlfriends, somehow.

It’s all fine, yeah? But then the faux-Spanish heroes you’ve fallen in love with have the cheek to make a record called ‘Romance Is Boring’. Romance made you, you bastards. All’s forgiven immediately though, given that Los Campesinos! happen to have set the benchmark for albums in 2010. That’s for true.

It scares me thinking that for a sustained period in my life, I didn’t really like Los Campesinos! Bizarre, isn’t it? Maybe I was caught up in ‘manning-up’ pretensions or something ridiculous, but I was too busy listening to music that required silly riffs or on yet another every-Nirvana-album-spree (which is still okay, incidentally) in my formative teenage years when I surely needed this band like oxygen.

Opening track ‘In Media Res’ doesn’t mess about. I mean, sure, the instrumentation’s typically intricate, and a million ideas are flowing from the violins, keys, guitars and rhythm section like you’d expect, but immediately we’re in the back seat of a car, ‘too fucked’ to drive, enjoying a moment of alcohol-induced lust before the guitars explode and the vocals are eerily distorted, which adds a layer of poignancy through capturing the bite of the words exactly. It’s cleverly produced, not over-laden with tricks, but crisp and clear enough to convey the tones of both honest serenades and roaring guitars like in ‘Plan A’, sly as a python in its slithering movement and with an equal amount of venom.

Title track ‘Romance Is Boring’ is the most straightforward song in the LC! repertoire, and it actually sounds a bit like ‘The Remote Part’ era Idlewild, in structure and form, with a chorus that assaults the subconscious to stay in yr head all day, week, month, year. There’s an appealing seesaw boy-girl vocal delivery, which will ring significant bells with fans of Johnny Foreigner and even Sons and Daughters, and this continues through the record, adding to the broken relationship texture, as resonant as when Jen Wood felt she ‘must interject here’ on The Postal Service’s ‘Such Great Heights’.

Like the worst relationships, the ill-considered rushed ventures we all take part in if we’re stupid enough, the excited first half of the album is like the very start of the romance, all giddy and intense, while the second half is more doubt-stricken, with dramatic conclusions and the knowing it isn’t working, and the minor key etc. The song titles are longer in the second half as the longer, dwelling thoughts and anxieties linger, and the songs don’t drop in quality, not by a long stretch, ‘This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind’ is, for example, a fantastic effort which sounds like it would be incredible live, but Los Campesinos! have been extremely effective in encapsulating how relationships are in possibly their most considered, consistent effort to date.

It’s way too early to start calling anything the ‘album of the year’ and for me to start making another nauseating end-of-year list, but this is the album to beat. It’s blistering in sunshine-drenched happiness while drowning in its own insecurities. It’s a bipolar rush of excitement before the inevitable fall. It’s hugely melancholic in parts without being annoying self-pitying emo (see You Me At Six) and through all the drama, it seems to wear a confident grin. This is the album to beat.

It’s bold, it’s beautiful, and it should be a staple in yr music diet this year.