Note: last week I logged the music that I listened to as part of the Music Diary 2012 project. Over the next little while I'm going to try writing about it. Sometimes I may engage the music head-on, other times I'll write about my listening habits, or the importance of context, or whatever. I'm playing this by ear and hoping it works out.
"Monday, on my way to work: 'The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future' by Los Campesinos!"
Los Campesinos! are the band which probably lies nearest to my heart. Mon dieu, do I love this beautiful, brazen band.
What makes LC! so special? At first - in the Sticking Fingers Into Sockets and Hold On Now, Youngster! era, it was because of their maximalist, heart-on-sleeve intensity - a mix of twee earnestness and punk rock fury. They're seven kids playing violins and glockenspiels and...! They all changed their last name to 'Campesinos!'! They have a song called "You! Me! Dancing!"! Exclamation mark! Exclamation mark!
This was all incredibly appealing, and the tunes were killer enough to make Hold On Now, Youngster... a favourite. But once the initial sugar rush subsided, what was left was even more compelling - Gareth's exquisitely detailed, brainy, heartrending lyrics. Our hero presented himself as smart and funny, a music geek like you or I (hear his dismay as he bemoans his girlfriend's lover's "K Records T-shirt"!), a real, honest child of the now ("like a final, fatal LiveJournal entry" goes one simile), heartbroken. It genuinely sounded like LC! had my back, even when no one else did. LC! were a band for sensitive indie kids "hyperintelligent enough to know that holding on won't get any easier", to cite Lord & Saviour Christgau. And surprisingly, smartly, LC! capitalized on this.
In subsequent records, the sweetness turns sour and the warm-bloodedness was increasingly replaced with caustic, over-the-top bile. Most of my friends who loved HONY... because you could put it on loop and dance to in your dorm room for hours no longer find anything appealing in this band, but I've grown more attached to them than ever.
What's changed? For better or for worse, Gareth's gone from a too-clever precocious Young Writer-type with a capital 'W' to more of a self-involved storyteller. So instead of lyrics about a fear of technology and "Ctrl+Alt+Deleting your face!" and a tendency to get carried away by "damn extended metaphors!" on the backs of natural disasters, we get lyrics predominately about Gareth's breakups and heartbreaks and just how fucking badly he takes them.
It sounds trite, but here's the rub: the woe-is-me-ness that inevitably permeates sad songs about girls is always tempered by a self-awareness, a willingness to self-deprecate - to be crass, bitter, pathetic, and miserable all in one go. Which is kind of how heartbreak seems to work (in my head, anyway). "I have broken down into the naked breasts of a newly-ex/No dignity, I can only guess that she thinks about it when she touches herself!" Gareth moans on a song called "Miserabilia" (seriously). On an explosive, visceral song of unrequited love called "I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know" (seriously) he describes himself in the throes of angst "rolling, writhing on the floor/staring daggers pulled from my thoracic wall," apologizing for having put the song's "You" through a "lifetime" of romantic declarations "that you never desired". It's a shitty, desperate position to be in, and about 90% of the appeal (or otherwise) of the modern LC! comes from the tension between that and the self-awareness of this shitty desperation and the self-loathing this self-awareness entails.
But every now and then Gareth and his band seem to nail something even more painful than run-of-the-mill romantic heartbreak (as perfectly as he does that). How to explain...? Something like the feeling of the existential weight of all of humanity, the sheer pain of not one's own life or even lives - but of the very act of living and dying. It sounds overblown and vague and silly, I know. But to me, at least, it seems to transcend navel-gazing, even as the lyrics are about listening to the sound of your own blood course. In "The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future", Gareth tells us that "rhis thing hurts like hell", and then asks himself, "But what did you expect?" What's "this thing" that hurts so bad? If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say he's talking about life itself.
As he's describing the brutal existential dread of feeling time unfolding across the horizon, Gareth paints a haunting picture of a troubled, possibly dead, possibly dead-by-suicide friend of his. What can I tell you about her from this song? She's anorexic, plays a mean video game, speaks French, is untrustworthy, has a fear of abandonment and a fetish for drowning and an addiction for prescription painkillers born out of childhood trauma. She "could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off her tongue". She's too precisely detailed to be just a fictional girl in a song, but also somehow too larger-than-life to live. Gareth's lament is almost mythical and a bit stream of consciousness - there's minimal connectivity between the various anecdotes starring this girl, political ranting, and surreal, vivid imagery.
All this focus on lyrics and I run the risk of snubbing the actual song. LC! is (despite its massive cast of musicians) something of a lyrics-first band, but here especially the arrangement goes a long way to make Gareth's writing reach the tremendous scale that it does. Those screaming string (?) shrieks in the second verse, the FUCKING LOUD chorus, the ebbing and flowing of the violin over the bubbling guitar riff - it's an incredible composition.
I really enjoy Hello Sadness, the most recent Los Campesinos! album. But in a lot of ways it sounds like a retreat from this - where Gareth and his friends finally stood right at the precipice of adulthood, of mortality, of the abyssal fact that being alone is significantly worse than being single, and that - no matter how hard we reach out to each other - in a way we are all alone.
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