Eight songs into No Blues, Gareth Campesinos! proudly states, “Béla Guttmann of love/ curse all of my exes to a life of celibacy.” No one else in rock, hip-hop, or any genre is making that kind of boast, and the most advanced Los Campesinos! fan will know exactly what Gareth means by it. A solid Los Campesinos! fan will suspect it’s a (non-American) football reference and have their assumptions confirmed after a quick Google search. A casual Los Campesinos! fan will only understand the second half of the line, as trying to invoke a supernatural hex on a former lover is a fairly common pastime in Gareth’s lyrics. And then there’s the new Los Campesinos! fan, who may not catch any of the lyrics at first, but will enjoy the taut, radiant melodies of “Let It Spill” and maybe even catch its resemblance to a particularly good Snow Patrol song. Therein lies the triumph of No Blues, LC!’s strongest release since their staggering 2008 two-fer Hold On Now, Youngster.../We Are Beatiful, We Are Doomed and a damn near necessary album from a band that had seemed content to be a diehards-only niche affair.
LC! have never made anything close to a bad record, but their two most recent LPs, Romance is Boring and Hello Sadness, occasionally struggled under the weight they assumed as a means of “maturing”—namely, Gareth’s increasingly dour lyrics and John Goodmanson’s carb-loaded production. There isn’t any sort of ascertainable attitude adjustment or sonic restructuring to No Blues (Goodmanson and guitarist Tom Campesinos! co-produced), instead LC!’s inspiration sounds self-imposed, no different than looking at the mirror and realizing they’d gotten a little bloated and puffy.
No Blues has an unidentifiable "something to prove," and nearly every song is superlative Los Campesinos! in some aspect. Rather than letting their energy splay out in all directions, LC! maintain a focus and unanimity that reinvigorates the band and should surprise people who may have checked out after Romance is Boring. With all seven members pushing in the same direction, the opening duo of “For Flotsam” and “What Death Leaves Behind” are as anthemic as LC!’s earliest work, though they achieve a kind of heretofore unimaginable liftoff—the call and response vocals merge into a unified front, the drums are huge. LC! have never sounded so muscular or crafted melodies as instantly memorable.
The lyrics take after the music, given an outer focus and clarity that reveals their density, enlarged to show texture. Gareth’s vocals are still yelped, pleaded and spat, though there’s a brazen confidence in his delivery here, a mastery of craft. “A Portrait of the Trequartista as a Young Man” details Gareth’s goriest revenge fantasy (“I’d excavate his throat of voice/ and corrugate his vocal cords...make him recite this murder ballad”) while “Glue Me” is their most over-the-top mope (yes, more than the Smiths-baiting “Cemetery Gaits”), mixing the most poetically potent images with the silliest jokes (the heterograph of the title, a snarky misquote from Titanic). Bedecked with marching drums and welling horns, “The Time Before the Last Time” is the prettiest LC! song, though perversely so—it might not confirm a break up by masturbating in a girlfriend’s shower while fantasizing about her housemate, but I’m not sure what else it could be about.
Though he often presents himself as a drunken, cuckolded, and death-obsessed reprobate, Gareth performs like a leader of men, the gender pronoun being intentional as No Blues still mostly pertains to his obsession with sports and male sexual frustration (“flotsam, jetsam, and spindrift—all the girls I have loved”). The lyrics sheet sets out quite the scavenger hunt if you’re up for it—Capel Celyn, Dick Fosbury, the 2004 League Cup, Tony Yeboah, Meurig Park, and Delphinus all get their due. Most of the proper nouns are soccer references, which gives Gareth a distinct, entirely unique P.O.V. as a rock lyricist. Indie still has a lot of hang-ups about being associated with the jocks, but sports fandom allows for obscene levels of obsession and projection. I mean, why are we allowed to use movies and music and literature to tell our own stories to ourselves, but not the unscripted, all-too-human drama when it dredges up so much source material about masculinity, ambition, competitiveness, civic pride, friendship, and whether God is real? The namedropping isn’t meant to show Gareth’s cleverness, but to pinpoint extremely specific feelings that no one else is capable of capturing—go find out what a Panenka penalty is and listen to “Glue Me” again knowing how it feels to screw one of those up and then you’ll understand the indignity described therein.
No Blues isn’t a promise, but rather a joke. On “As Lucerne (The Low)”, Gareth brags “there is no blues that could sound quite as heartfelt as mine” and further proves his point: “I hum the sorriest tune on the bar of these dives/ send all the patrons running home to make up with their first wives.” The parenthetical refers to the hook, which ostensibly sums up the expereince of being a Los Campesinos! fan—“the low is what I came for.” Yet, in a strange way, No Blues ends up sounding like the happiest LC! record, or at least the most implicitly hopeful. Sure, Gareth seems to be taking more joy than ever in crafting verbal monuments to his self-loathing. But after “Let It Spill” compares his eventual spiritual implosion to meteorological catastrophe and “The Time Before the Last Time”’s nihilistic, psychosexual closure comes “Selling Rope (Swan Dive To Estuary)”, where Gareth plunges off a bridge only to spend the descent realizing that the act is going completely unnoticed.
Perhaps it’s a sign that there’s a limit to his miserablist exhibitionism? Maybe there's more to aspire to than simply having "Sad Story" as the only two words on his headstone (to quote "Cemetery Gaits")? In a way, literally hitting bottom on "Selling Rope" means there's nowhere to go but up. In hindsight, it might also reveal the unspoken completion of the chorus in the uber-Los Campesinos! anthem “Avocado, Baby”. The cheerleading chorus and ecstatic drumming are a sonic throwback to their 2007 EP Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, but you also remember Gareth introduced himself as a guy who can’t dance for shit—so while he brags of a “heart of stone, rind so tough it’s crazy,” turns out he’s still kinda sweet and mushy on the inside.
