Next time I get to see Los Campesinos! Live, I hope I will know all the lyrics, because shouting your heart out with Gareth Campesinos! seems to be a big part of the game, just doing the same thing that these youngsters front row, who were really, really into the music. Unfortunately I didn’t know the lyrics, but was fascinated by the passion, the fervor of all this, …it was a communion, a I-live-what-this-guy-means confession, and it lasted for 15 songs. ‘How many of you are going to school tomorrow?’ asked Gareth with his Scottish accent… and a lot of people raised up their hand (I didn’t), exposing very well the age range of the crowd.
May be they played all their hits, I couldn’t tell, but all the songs were received with the same youthful enthusiasm, and soon the audience was jumping non-stop, especially during 'Death To Los Campesinos!'… And all the following songs. There was a lot of excited clapping involved too, and since these young people were already camping close to the stage before I arrived around 8 pm, and left the theater past midnight, I am not sure a lot of homework got done that night.
But screw school, it was time for wordy, cryptic, weird songs reflecting teenagers’ angst, and talking about failing romances, self-deprecation and sex,… isn’t question of sex a lot in the songs? Oh I totally see why these kids are all over the lyrics now! ‘Cause we were kissing for hours with her hands in my trousers’, screamed Gareth in the first song they played ‘By Your Hand’,… ‘I will wake, I will bake phallic cake’ in ‘Romance Is Boring’,… ‘Your tongue the tide/your lips the shore/I am the jetsam overboard’ in ‘Hello Sadness’,… and the best line ever, crushing despair and sex in the same thought, ‘Oh, we kid ourselves There’s future in the fucking/but there is no fucking future’, in their famous ‘We Are Beautiful, We are Doomed’, no wonder, no wonder, it was funny and desperate, witty and bold, that’s why I should know the lyrics next time.
On stage, it was a super buoyant band, first of all there were seven of them, then their complex music, which was reminding me Broken Social Scene, Art Brut and Titus Andronicus at the same time with a lot of exclamation points, hardly took a rest from the soaring choruses and bouncy rhythms, and never stopped going into many directions at the same time. They were playing their songs back to back, with an upbeat liveliness and fists in the air, building more energy with violent beats, a nervous angry delivery, engaging the crowd into even more beer-fueled-clapping. I know a lot of the youngsters hadn’t reached the drinking age yet, but there was a least one obnoxious girl, totally wasted, who was insisting at having a conversation with Gareth, she even wanted to go on stage with her friends. ‘It’s not gonna happen!’ he told her, ‘This is my time to shine!’ he added,…’Did I come up okay?’ half-amused, half embarrassed about what he had just said, but he explained the band would be next to the t-shirt booth after the show, totally available for anyone.
Gareth was wriggling like an excited and angry animal, he was holding the mic with great strength, half-speaking thought the song, making vocal harmonies with Kim Campesinos!, making some intense faces until he would explode, enraged, all red like a bomb. At this point, the general admission floor had turned into a dance-moshing floor, even more obvious during ‘You! Me! Dancing!’. ‘Last time we played in LA, at the Echoplex, I was sick, I had a terrible time,… like this young lady’ he said pointing to the drunk girl,…’Excuse me’, she screamed, trying to get the attention again but failing as the band had already started the next song… and everyone was laughing and jumping.
They came back for an encore and it was another shout-fest with Gareth going right in the middle of the crowd for the last song, ‘Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks’. Wasn’t it a pretty dark song to close all this unrestrained enthusiasm? But they were all dark and dramatic, with lyrics screamed at unison by a crowd ready to open up its chest from all this shouting, in a sort of collective emo sacrifice.
Setlist
1. By Your Hand
2. Death To Los Campesinos!
3. Romance Is Boring
4. Hello Sadness
5. Letters from Me to Charlotte
6. Ways to Make It Through the Wall
7. We Are Beautiful, We are Doomed
8. Songs about your Girlfriend
9. Straight In at 101
10. To Tundra
11. You! Me! Dancing!
12. The Sea Is A Good Place to Think of the Future
13. Baby I Got The Death Rattle
Encore
14 Knee Deep at ATP
15 Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks
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