Review: Los Campesinos! at the Brudenell Social Club

By December 16, 2014

Music. Leeds.

[Image, Los Campesinos!]

Los Campesinos! @ Brudenell Social Club,
Friday 5th December 2014

For Los Campesinos! more is more; they have six members, multiple guitars, keyboards, drums, a tambourine, and a glockenspiel. The effect is a wave of sound that lifts the audience off their feet and keeps them bouncing from the first full thrash of You! Me! Dancing! to the last echoing chants of Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks, We leave Alone. It is a gig for the fans and the band plays hits from every album, some new stuff from their upcoming EP, and a few “mid tempo album tracks” that the guys have brushed off and brought out of the LC back catalogue for the present tour.

The Brudenell Social Club is a perfect space for their sound and the crowd is clearly full of real fans, shouting the lyrics right back at the stage.
This is more impressive when you consider that the lyrics to a Los Campesinos! song are more like the beat poetry of Kerouac or Ginsberg; a torrent of thoughts, memories, and fantasy, punctuated with phrases that get into your head and reverberate all weekend. Learning them takes some dedication, and repeated listening. Halfway through the gig Gareth Campesinos confesses that in preparation for performing some old songs he’d had to search for his own lyrics on songmeanings.com. And they weren’t even right. He is clearly half joking, as there is a thick laminated song book sitting in front of him, with a red tambourine holding it in place. It is an apt image for the band’s particular blend of lyrical craft and symphonic joy.

The crowd is boisterous yet respectful; they jump and sway, but you don’t need to worry about flailing limbs that will take the beer right out of your hand.
. The six piece, multi-instrumental band come together, sometimes a cacophony of sound, sometimes a melodic sway, sometimes just the steady beat of Gareth’s voice carrying into the crowd. The venue suits the more expansive moments, and the quieter ones too. Towards the end of the night they play The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future, a track from their 2010 album ‘Romance is Boring’. The crowd is ponderous, quieter, as the lyrics mount to the inevitable crescendo:

‘A good place to look to the future is when you are sat at the sea/with the salt up to your ankles and a view of the end of the pier/you may look down at your models feel and wish that you’d just float away/and the weather here is overcast and the sea is the same shade of grey/so the landscape before you looks just like the edge of the world/but to the left side and the right side either way is a crazy golf course!’

It is Los Campesinos! through and through; profound and carnivalesque at the same time. The crowd take in the moment of stillness, and then they are back, yelling out the chorus in unison: ‘And all you can hear is the sound of your own heart!’

Robin Alexander Styles

 

You can follow Los Campesinos! @ http://loscampesinos.com/
They have a Christmas EP available now which is entitled ‘A Los Campesinos! Christmas – EP’

 

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