Plumbiferous Media

The ever-eclectic Campesinos! (known col­lec­tively as Los Campesinos!) released their newest album this past Tues­day, fol­low­ing their 2009 semi-hiatus and the dual-release year of 2008. Romance Is Bor­ing is a col­lec­tion of 15 tracks, short enough that they fit well under an hour of play­time. And while Los Campesinos! by no means needed that many tracks, Romance Is Bor­ing does effec­tively show­case the band’s often, though not entirely, pos­i­tive level of devel­op­ment since its last production.

At this point, it’s no sur­prise that Romance Is Bor­ing’s vocals con­sist more of yelling melodies loudly than singing. In fact, it’s part of what we’ve come to expect from Los Campesinos!, and now that singer Gareth Campesinos! has fully embraced that his vocal call­ing is more in the punk realm than indie, he’s given Los Campesinos! a wel­come boost of energy with his impas­sioned shouts. Unfor­tu­nately, his female coun­ter­part Alek­san­dra Campesinos! (who shares his ten­dency towards off-tune tan­gents dur­ing actual singing) hasn’t quite fol­lowed his exam­ple, lead­ing to some rather awk­ward duets. When it works, it works well (usu­ally when they’re both yelling), and then there’s “Plan A.” When both vocal­ists are at their best (or dur­ing one of Gareth’s solos), the vocals are per­fectly suited to the music. When they’re not, at least it’s amusing.

From the first line of Romance Is Bor­ing (“But let’s talk about you for a minute / With the vomit in your gul­let / From a half bot­tle of vodka we’d stolen from the Optic”), it’s obvi­ous that the album’s going to be infused with the same alter­nately depressed and ecsta­tic sar­cas­tic humor of which Los Campesinos! is so fond - and Romance Is Bor­ing cer­tainly doesn’t dis­ap­point. Filled with the sort of quasi-romance song that begins with “I think we need more post-coital / And less post-rock,” the album can’t help being occa­sion­ally awk­ward, but always inter­est­ing and often hilar­i­ous. Though there are a few great sec­tions and verses (“In Media Res’” sec­ond verse, begin­ning “I’m leav­ing my body to sci­ence / Not med­ical but physics” is prob­a­bly the best), Romance Is Bor­ing thrives mostly on witty lines - “So fuck­ing on/And so fuck­ing forth/We’ve got your back/Whatever that’s worth” from “We’ve Got Your Back (Doc­u­mented Minor Emo­tional Break­down #2)” and “A lush in denial / Only rather coquet­tish” from “I Just Sighed” among them.

For the most part, the instru­men­tals pro­vide a per­fect accom­pa­ni­ment to the yelps, screams, and occa­sional bouts of melody that spurt from the mouths of Gareth and Alek­san­dra. Between very inter­est­ing bass lines and dis­cords that grow and dis­solve around oth­er­wise well-maintained, cheery lines, the music is well grounded and quite strong. Tran­si­tions where Los Campesinos! flirt with post-rock stylings, toy­ings with stereo that some­how don’t quite sound obnox­ious, and per­fectly exe­cuted glis­san­dos, the instru­men­tal­ists are often at the top of their game.

Unfor­tu­nately, ‘often’ and ‘all the time’ are not syn­ony­mous. There’s cer­tainly a rea­son that most albums have some­where around 10 tracks, and it may have to do with the fact that there’s a good chunk of the album (from track 8 to 13) that is, for the most part, either repet­i­tive, way too con­for­ma­tive to the rest of the album, or sim­ply not all that good. So even though Los Campesinos! more than once sound bet­ter than they ever have in the past, Romance Is Bor­ing is not an amaz­ing album.

Though Romance Is Bor­ing doesn’t quite match up to Los Campesinos’s 2008 album We Are Beau­ti­ful, We Are Doomed (one of our 2008 top albums), it’s a step for­ward for Los Campesinos! in a num­ber of impor­tant ways - vocally as well as instru­men­tally. At the same time, how­ever, among the fif­teen tracks are both very suc­cess­ful exam­ples of Los Campesinos! sound and a num­ber of tracks that really can’t be described as any­thing but filler. Nev­er­the­less, at its core Romance Is Bor­ing is largely enter­tain­ing and a good fourth album for Los Campesinos!.

This post is tagged 70-79, Los Campesinos!