Los Campesinos!’s song “You’ll Need Those Fingers For Crossing” from their album We are Beautiful, We Are Doomed released in 2008 is an impetuous song that shakes you up till the end. The vitality of the delivery is almost a hostile attack to your neurons and I cannot listening to it without thinking about Arcade Fire’s rebellion or one song of Broken Docial Scene. But it is way messier than Arcade Fire, there is much more cacophony and discordance at times, and the lyrics are more crudely ironic: If there is still an uprising, there is no hope left.
What are these lyrics about anyway? Anorexic people who refuse to eat? (‘The less and less I eat the more you see my teeth’), vampires? (‘I can taste the blood on your lips and on your tongue’), people lost at sea without any food? (‘We curse the weather, Rip the flesh from your bones, Wipe me down, Drive me home’),
It may rather be about people committing suicide together (‘I’m sucking your last words from the back of your throat – So perfect, so bitter, we laugh then we choke’), people who shout their anger to an absent God before the ultimate crossing. The rush of the cadence built by a mix of guitars and violins, and the half morbid-half humoristic lyrics make the whole thing an insolent revolt against an oblivious transcendence. The irony is that we are not sure what they are dying for nor what this vampiric relationship was about.