The music of Los Campesinos! has always been about straddling the line between sincerity and irony. It's a tough game to play, but thanks to songwriter Gareth Campesinos' wry humor and self-deprecation, the band has been able to make a career out of writing songs where breakups literally equal death. The music is intensely personal, but it's equally as inclusive-- Gareth paints himself as having it worse than anyone, but the unspoken acknowledgment that makes the band churn is that he really just has it as bad as everyone else.
Hello Sadness is the band's fourth album, and though not much has changed with the band itself, the ground underneath which LC! stand has shifted. Gareth's style of writing-- naked oversharing that goes far past the margins of his pad-- used to feel like a natural outgrowth of the type of discourse found at places like LiveJournal and Blogger, but those mediums are dinosaurs now, replaced by the opacity of Tumblr and the short, controlled blasts of Twitter. Likewise, the band's serrated twee is not exactly in fashion in the world of indie rock right now, a truth that's an undercurrent of their announcement late last year that they would be distributing a quarterly fanzine. But, if LC! are the last men and women left holding the flag for an antiquated era of indie rock, it has only intensified their vitality to those looking for more than chillwave's call to tune in, turn on, and drop out.
Though the album is arguably the band's darkest yet, it starts off with both the album's peppiest song and one of LC!'s best singles to date. "By Your Hand" finds Gareth at the very infancy of a budding romance, and it casts him as a sort of lovable hero, a role that he inhabits when he's not, say, fantasizing about burning the skin off his hands before going to a palmist. Gareth narrates himself initiating another round of dirty texting before breaking into one of the more memorable passages he's penned: his fooling around with "fate"-- "a cruel mistress, girl"-- who suggests that the two go back to her place, where "fate" then, naturally, vomits on him. He does this with gusto, which is accentuated by the chorus, wherein the entire band shouts, "By your hand is the only end that I foresee." The exuberance, not just for the romance itself but for his eventual end at the hand of his lover, is crucial to Gareth's ability to write songs about what happens when the relationship is at the other end of the spectrum. We know that he's always coming back for more, even when the rest of us can't stomach it.
Otherwise Hello Sadness is an album largely obsessed with themes of despair and images of death, but Gareth is an able gallows humorist. On the album's final track he enters a slaughterhouse where he sees his guts strung up, only for him to be turned away because "his sad eyes are too much to bear." On "Baby, I Got the Death Rattle" he gets frostbite from scribbling dicks in the snow for every girl that wouldn't sleep with him before watching a halo slip from the top of his lover's head and, presumably, decapitate her. And then there is "Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)", Gareth's long-coming ode to the English soccer team, wherein crosses on the pitch become crucifixes and the team's crest nearly claws him to death. It is the album's centerpiece, if only because for Gareth, and for a lot of us, the one thing more wrenching than romance is sports.
These songs are genuinely affecting, though, both because they explore the darkest depths of a romantic's psyche and because LC! have transitioned rather seamlessly into maturity. The fizzy, excitable songwriting of their early output is far in the past, and they've learned to write songs that build and swell to moments that can knock you off your feet ("To Tundra" is the killer here). Gareth also explores his range as a vocalist to great success, stretching himself to sing melodically and in a strikingly deeper voice. His vocals have long been a breaking point for many non-converts, and while Gareth hasn't morphed into King Krule, his impressive singing here bodes well for the future of a band whose music largely revolves around him.
The buzz has long worn off of Los Campesinos!, but Hello Sadness is their fourth straight great album, and each of them is close enough in quality that you'd likely get split numbers if you conducted a straw poll at one of the band's shows. Even if there is no breakthrough moment for them, there is something to be said for a band that is this young, this consistent, and this committed to both carrying the torch for and freshening up a style of indie rock that has, for the moment at least, been left behind.
