10.27.07
It’s not for the cock, it’s for the seven body pop army
Los Campesinos! @ Rescue Rooms- 20/10/2007
In terms of hopes for a gig with great crowd interaction and atmosphere, it’s not a great sign when the merchandise stall guys seem to make up a third of the crowd for the support band. This being the case, You Say Party! We Say Die! head stagewards with something of a challenge ahead.
The band shuffle through their set of rattling, dancy punk songs that, although include all the correct ingredients, fail to ignite any excitement in the spectators. The crowd are half hearted about the band to say the least. Even when bombastically haired singer Becky Ninkovic literally forces them to come closer to the stage, little in the way of atmosphere is apparent. The band have potential but unfortunately aren’t quite anything special just yet.
By the time Los Campesinos! are due on, the room has started to increase in numbers at least a little bit. The band skip onstage- looking pleasantly surprised at the novelty of having a stage which is big enough to avoid the seven of them huddled together with no room to move.
The band take glorious, soaring pop songs and knock them out of shape with fast guitars, blasts of violins and mish-mash keyboards- all providing the canvas for singer Gareth’s wry, and often downright bizarre, lyrics. We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives, for example, warns us on the dangers of playing pass the parcel with body parts and how “someone might get hurt”. Genuinely good advice, you’ll surely agree.
The different members of the band- smashing the shit out of the drums, ferociously hitting the glockenspiel, swapping microphones, creating flurries of violin parts- are united in the fact that they all clearly love what they’re doing. Despite a pretty smallish crowd, the band seem overjoyed to be playing to us and it’s hard not to share their enthusiastic grins.
Los Campesinos! have a collection of scrappy, wonderfully lo-fi demos and a handful of freshly squeezed singles that sounds like a greatest hits list. In case you didn’t know, this is before they’ve even released their debut album. You! Me! Dancing!, for example, is a sugar rush of storming indie guitar perfection with bursts of glockenspiel glittering over the top, whilst Please Don’t Tell Me To Do The Math(s) is an anthemic breath of fresh air which makes you feel glad to be alive. In short, this a band that should be welcomed as princes and princesses of indie pop but who are actually, tonight at least, received with a pretty lukewarm reaction. Maybe its becuase everyone’s watching England lose at football’s ugly cousin. Maybe not but either way, Los Campesinos! are great despite this and deserve much more.