First there's the rule about not naming your band with an exclamation point, period. Then there's the one about not changing your last names so they're all the same as the band's, unless you're the Ramones (or arguably the Pastels). Referring to yourselves in a language not spoken in your country of origin? Another bad idea. Welsh boy/girl septet Los Campesinos! proved themselves an exception to all those rules this spring with Hold on Now, Youngster..., a debut album that encapsulated the best of three decades of indie's participatory culture.
There's no rule yet about not releasing a follow-up to your debut album in the same year, mostly because few bands have had the audacity to try it. Los Campesinos! are hedging their bets: they have yet to refer to We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed as their "second album," even when they announced it would come in a limited pressing with a DVD documentary, poster, and 30-page zine (including contributions from members of Xiu Xiu, Grandaddy, Tender Forever, Menomena, Parenthetical Girls, and the Beautiful South). There will be no singles (and to these ears, there are none), and some online retailers have taken to listing the 10-track, 32-minute release as a "mini-album." Forget the technicalities and call it what it is: a messy, glorious, and cohesive artistic document of internet café-era indie life that sounds best when sung by heart.
Recorded in Seattle with John Goodmanson (Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Wu-Tang Clan), We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is a fittingly noisy release from a band who recently spent time on the "Shred Yr Face" tour with No Age and Times New Viking. The seismic instrumental "Between an Erupting Earth and an Exploding Sky" is reminiscent of a Swell Maps soundscape, and leads directly into the motorik-locked melancholia of "You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing". Standout "Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time" is a lovelorn miniature epic, with gusting guitars and Parenthetical Girls-quoting lo-fi vocals which shift midway through to folky strums and scratchy, indecipherable mumbling. If you mistakenly dismissed the band as another set of childish twee-poppers, our special today is crow.
Los Campesinos! haven't changed drastically, though. Their self-loathing, anti-romantic bitterness, and LiveJournal detail have only intensified. Several songs sound like scuffed-up, feedback-streaked versions of the first record's shouty, strings- and glockenspiel-touched punk-pop, only the despair is now less deceptively perky, and more, um, desperate. Crashing opener "Ways to Make It Through the Wall" resigns itself to hopelessness, death, and the inevitability of becoming like our parents, even as it wonders "how you break the rules that you yourself imposed." Bleaker still, "The End of the Asterisk" rages of another person's self-deprecation, "It's spot on, and I'm better."
The precocious youngsters of the debut have become increasingly like the prematurely old man of Weezer's classic Pinkerton. Vomit is a recurring theme, on the cathartic title track and on "Miserabilia", which describes kneeling at urinals and imagines an ex masturbating. From 4 a.m. drunk dialing, "It's Never That Easy Though, Is It? (Song for the Other Kurt)" goes on to contemplate which is worse: "To see my ex-girlfriend/ Who by the way, I'm still in love with/ Sucking the face of some pretty boy"? Or to watch it happen "with my favorite band's most popular song in the background"? The finale, "All Your Kayfabe Friends", screeches to a halt after a fateful closing line: "I love the look of lust between your thighs."
Los Campesinos! know their history; they may be doomed, but not just to repeat it. We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed's ragged sound and distinctive packaging, like the band's propensity for non-album 7"s, hearken back to previous decades, but they're also an attempt to develop a new underground community in the here and now. "We want this to feel like a proper event, the sort of thing that you're going to be hyped about going to see for days or weeks before, and the sort of thing that when you leave will stick long in your memory, and that you'll be happy to have been a part of," co-lead singer Gareth Campesinos! says ramblingly of the Shred Yr Face tour, addressing us-- as rappers often do but indie rockers so far usually haven't-- via YouTube. "It is, undoubtedly, a little narcissistic," he adds. It ain't trickin' if you got it.
