It’s all in the exclamation mark for Los Campesinos!

The band from Wales has quickly built a fan base in the U.S.

By Esten Hurtle
March 4, 2008

Los Campesinos! are not farmers, nor are they Spanish. In fact, the only part of the band’s name that really makes any contextual sense is the exclamation mark. When discussing this British indie-pop act, punctuation is key. All members of the band have adopted “Campesinos!” (exclamation included) as their surname, and their debut album, Hold on Now, Youngster... is riddled with commas and ellipses.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Los Campesinos! might be one of the cleverest bands ever to write songs about bedroom dancing and music festivals. After releasing two EPs and three singles, the seven-piece band’s first full-length effort has assuredly blown the collective DSL lines of all the bloggers that doted over their first tracks. Hold on Now, Youngster... is a debut that ranks up there with the best of them, from Arcade Fire’s Funeral to Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted.

Unlike Pavement, Los Campesinos! is not minimalist; though the band often sounds like it could be. Any group with seven members would have a hard time convincing anyone that it strips music down to its bare essentials.

Even with diverse instrumentation, what propels them is not the glockenspiel or the bells, it is the sound of an electric guitar or fuzzed-out synthesizer playing simple and catchy melodies. This is where Los Campesinos! shines. Hold on Now, Youngster... is an album that thinks it’s an extended single; every song is perfectly listenable on its own, without any context whatsoever. It’s the Who’s Next to all the indie Tommy’s, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn to the Dark Side of the Moon’s. With more and more artists concentrating on innovation at the expense of substance, it’s refreshing to see a band that can deftly manage both.

Lyrically, this album is as quotable as a Monty Python film and in a strikingly similar fashion. The cornerstone of Los Campesinos!’s songwriting skill is their ability to create wit that is highbrow enough to be interesting but accessible enough to actually be entertaining. Commentaries on music culture abound, including critiques of that culture in and of itself. “It’s sad that you think that we’re all just scenesters/And even if we were it’s not the scene you’re thinking of,” Gareth Campesinos! shouts in “You! Me! Dancing!,” one of the first tracks the band released which has been re-recorded for the album. It’s apparent that the only “scene” Los Campesinos! belongs to is the one where people mention boy bands and the philosophy of John Locke in the same track. That is to say, they belong to none whatsoever.

It is tempting to say that the band lacks pretension, but when they name drop artists like Meanwhile, back in Communist Russia that idea quickly falls apart. Instead, they have just enough pretension to make their comments pointed and their wit relevant without sounding like assholes.

We happen to live in an age when seven kids just out of college in Wales can write music, get signed to a small label and gain an audience a few thousand miles away. Most musicians take this for granted, but Los Campesinos! seems to be keenly aware of the power of instantaneous communication. They pepper their lyrics with universal pop-culture and write guitar riffs that prove rock music is still written for the people who listen to it. Unlike their song “This Is How You Spell, ‘HAHAHA, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics’” would suggest, Los Campesinos! is not destroying anyone’s faith in music. In fact, with their catchy tunes and clever lyrics, they are recreating it.

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