Los Campesinos! - Sick Scenes

The Guardian 80

(Wichita)

Raw-nerved, bare-souled and sharp enough to draw blood with those glockenspiels, Los Campesinos! were one of the keepers of the mid-2000s indie glut. As they enter their uncertain 30s, the former tweecore enfants terribles continue to grow up disgracefully, balancing a warmer, mature sound with a still-angry energy. “Not right to call this old age, but it certainly ain’t youth,” admits Gareth David on the punchy, rousing Hung Empty, while reflecting that “depression is a young man’s game” on the dreamier, wistful 5 Flucloxacillin. Thoughts on their roots take a delicate, sorrowful turn on The Fall of Home, while the frenetic, seething I Broke Up in Amarante explores fear and loathing in Portugal. It’s scene-stealing stuff.

Drowned In Sound 80

A glimpse of a golden era, for sure, though you get the sense that if you were sat in a similar position and the grim task of relaying the pertinent information fell to Los Campesinos! that maybe, just maybe, you’d be able to make peace with it.

As if tempting fate, this scribe would wind up on a hospital trolley about a week after penning the above words, frantically asking a bemused doctor, ‘Am I dying?’. A rueful shake of the head and dismissive laugh never felt so welcome, but the truth, dear reader, is that the kissing disease should be immediately renamed as there is zero gaiety or frivolity to be enjoyed when laid up with such an excruciating and energy-draining nightmare.

So there I was, sprawled out amidst a procession of Friday night/Saturday morning trauma that ranged from drug-assisted weekend overindulgence to significantly more harrowing fare, all of which put things into perspective, especially once headphones were eventually donned and a different set of Sick Scenes entered the fray. Welcome ones. Los Campesinos! have always put the precipice into their own unique context to the point that few acts mix the convivial with the sentimental quite as effectively as the Welsh outfit.

Their catalogue is hardly short of examples but take a listen to this album’s predecessor, a triumph of a record that turns words like ‘winsome’ and ‘wistful’ into weapons both jagged and gilded. Detractors of this band might suggest that it’s all a bit student-y, an obvious collision of on-the-nose couplets and buoyant arrangements in the face of knowingly erudite-yet-grounding subject matter. But to dismiss LC for their fervour is to miss the point entirely, and it does a disservice to a faction that continue to endure and look at the world much in the same fashion as those who’ve been on board since they were cordially invited to have a bop together almost a decade ago.

No Blues was arguably blessed with more ennui than usual, its lived-in conviction authentic as talk of love, loss and the majesty of Tony Yeboah washed over a clutch of tracks that represented people at something of a crossroads in life. Sick Scenes follows suit accordingly, right down to the expected references to football and wrestling, but it’s further down a forked path, if such a manoeuvre is possible.

”Depression is a young man’s game”, notes frontman Gareth David with signature rueful spikiness on ‘5 Flucloxacillin’. Now the wrong side of 30, it’s only natural that he would meet the burning world around him with a sense of detachment and questions that may well go unanswered. The early days of carefree promise are gone – here recalled a touch mournfully on caustic opener ‘Renato Dell’Ara (2008)’ – replaced by day jobs and the reality of slogging it out in something of a cult enterprise as societal walls slowly start to close in.

And yet, Sick Scenes isn’t a doom and gloom exercise, nor miserable thousand-yard stare. Instead it is the sound of a band doubling down on what brought them to their particular dance, peppered with unflinching honesty and conviction, all dressed up in requisite ‘take us or leave us’ glamour. That’s why you’ll find good old-fashioned frustration - ”It seems unfair to try your best but feel the worst” hollered to the heavens on the rollicking ‘I Broke Up In Amarante’ – cosying up to scenes from a teenage marriage on the excellent ‘A Slow, Slow Death’; ”I got your initials inside a heart tattoo / We two in vermillion, we two a lover’s coup”. And then there’s a short Brexit-inspired lament.

I know, it sounds kinda ropey, right? Only, it doesn’t. As ever with Los Campesinos! there’s a frequency to tune into here, and it can be quite the succour. You go back to a song like ‘Glue Me’ and a ‘wait, is the glass half-full or half-empty?’ treatise often enough and you realise that it really doesn’t matter, that it’s about getting swept up in this strange maelstrom and enjoying the visceral reaction if it comes. Here, you delve into the gloriously simple ‘Got Stendahl’s’ and its talk of séances, ghosts and monoliths, losing yourself in a coda as wounded as it is hopeful. You dive past a dodgy pun title like ‘For Whom The Belly Tolls’ and fall for the song within. You feel the everyday punches thrown in ‘A Litany/Heart Swells’.

That’s the intoxication, felt on a long walk through the rain or when in need of escape as troubled souls stretch out nearby beneath cold blinking lights. In the right moment, it’s as powerful a drug as a shot in the arm, a crutch as you get older and don’t know where the fuck you’re going. Then again, this is a record that closes on a most sobering exclamation point, so perhaps it is indeed all about perspective, after all.

Pitchfork 76

Gareth Campesinos! is our bard of throwing up. For a decade, nearly every word that has come out of the Los Campesinos! singer’s mouth has presented itself with rash inelegance, candidness, and the need to be ejected from his body this very second. But sometimes, as anyone who’s stared down the depths of a toilet bowl knows, vomit is just vomit. Like that time he sang of an awkward hookup that was blown when a girl upchucked all over his rented tuxedo; or when he recounted that early heartbreak when he got wasted, ate too many potato chips, and then deposited the greasy snack right back onto a soccer field. For Gareth, such trials are the punchline to humanity’s cruel joke. They are essential experiences, embarrassments that turn into collective elation once they hit open air. Because, for all its indecency, throwing up makes us feel better.

Sick Scenes, the British group’s sixth album, plays like a love letter to aging indie idealism; to the fans who have reveled in this band’s careening pop-punk singalongs, scathing neuroses, and charmingly specific soccer references. There is yet another ode to semi-digestion here when Gareth advises: “Save your epiphanies… for chucking up in your own hands.” It’s unconventional wisdom from a man who would know, and the line hints at a weathered sageness that lingers throughout. On the prescription ode “5 Flucloxacillin,” the drums drop out to spotlight the singer’s oh-so-specific stasis as he laments, “Another blister pack pops, but I still feel much the same—31 and depression is a young man’s game.” At that, stalwart musical leader Tom Campesinos! peals off a 15-second guitar solo to lift spirits enough for the next verse.

Given the financial gauntlet nearly every independent band must face in 2017, it seems like a minor miracle that Los Campesinos! still exist at all. And nobody knows this more than Los Campesinos! A large part of their enduring appeal—remember, they began as a MySpace band—has to do with the fact that they were never especially trendy. Too sugary for the emo diehards, too tart for the indie bandwagoners, too emo for the cool kids. Their target audience could be as particular as one of Gareth’s excruciating tales of broken romance, but also just as passionate; strength in small numbers.

To fund the making of Sick Scenes, the band sold about a thousand soccer jerseys with the word “DOOMED” scrawled across the chest. Their message could not be clearer: This is a team, and you are part of it. The idea plays out in one of the record’s most touching moments, near the end of manic-panic crack up “I Broke Up In Amarante,” when Gareth starts a hook on his own, but soon stalls out. “I’m going to need you to help me out here,” he mutters, and a full chorus of voices enter to winningly finish a song about the inevitability of defeat.

Recorded amid the harsh realities of Brexit, Sick Scenes faintly opens up its miserabilia to bring in the wider world. These are not anthems of woke-ness, but Gareth’s disappointment and anger don't sound quite as rash; he’s been around long enough to reflect upon many sad cycles. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “The Fall of Home,” this band’s most beautifully heart-crushing song to date. Backed by little more than a cello, a violin, and some plinking piano notes, Gareth gets to the core of Western society’s current cultural divides: between rural and urban, parents and children, those moving ahead and those staying behind. “Left your hometown for somewhere new/Don’t be surprised now it’s leaving you,” he sings. It’s a eulogy to youth that zeroes in with precision, each detail more wrenching than the last: “funeral for a family pup” and “battery dies on your monthly call” and, finally, “gave the fascists a thousand ticks.” But this song isn’t a simple slam on the generalized “small-town mentality,” considering Gareth essentially still lives in the same small English town he grew up in. Instead, “The Fall of Home” comes off like a sympathetic plea from someone familiar with both sides, who disagrees with the nationalist impulse but can fathom its root. And in its understanding, there is a glimmer of hope.

A strange positivity can also be found on an ambling track called “A Slow, Slow Death” that concludes with the lines: “There’s a slow, slow death if you want it/Yeah, I want it.” Instead of glorifying death or poking fun at it, though, this is a statement of stubborn resilience, of life. Especially in the streamed today/trashed tomorrow world of modern music, the possibility of a slow death can seem revolutionary. Los Campesinos! will never be the biggest, the best-looking, the most loved. But when their time comes, they will be able to look back, content.