It’s quite a thing to make one’s First Album In Seven Years – in this modern landscape where the genesis of most albums is two years or shorter, one would be wise to turn one’s head at the mention of new material from one of the aughts’ best bands, and Los Campesinos! [including the exclamation mark to the chagrin of every AutoCorrect known to humankind] are returning with All Hell in 2024, which, if its singles so far signal anything, might quickly be recognized as one of their most essential albums. They’re joined in Boston by Pittsburgh’s Short Fictions, with some tight rock arrangements on the heels of their own new record whose lengthy title, Oblivion Will Own Me, and Death Alone Will Love Me seems like it might owe a stylistic debt to LC!’s love for crafting such titles for their own music. Short Fictions bring along only the finest mid-set musings on Charli xcx, “matching one’s freak”, beans on toast, and unlikely ways to modify the potency of adderall.
Just as was evidenced when they toured with no particular album in mind in 2022, the band have plenty of songs that people have absorbed and made part of their lives, American audiences eager to revisit them. Interestingly though, the makeup of the audience when LC! grace the Paradise Rock Club in Boston skews surprisingly young; it’s Father’s Day, and there’s a healthy portion of both early 40-somethings and kids with Xs markered onto their hands singing along to nearly every word in the set, with a crowd of youthful folks who can still withstand any potential jumping or dancing situated squarely at the front. Many of these folks seem like they were in elementary school at the time LC!’s popularity was burgeoning in the 2010s, if that – there’s likely some generational osmosis owing to many of the attendees’ presence. A couple of groups have brought Pride flags along on account of it being June. It’s a warming sight of all-around goodwill, a contingent of kids seeing the band for the first time side by side with their progenitors who’ve been singing along for decades.
Fronted by Gareth Paisey, the singer speaks as so many do of the more than half-dozen times the band has played here before, including at the legendary Great Scott dive, whose hollowed corpse two minutes down the road is now the site of a fast-food restaurant. The mention draws cheers and the requisite ensuing mournfulness from the elder members of the crowd. They begin with ‘A Psychic Wound’, one of the glimpses of the upcoming All Hell. Their itinerary for the night is full of songs that have wormed or crashed their way into people’s hearts over the years, as well as additional previews of the upcoming record. One of the strongest forthcoming pieces is easily ‘Feast of Tongues’, which follows ‘Allez les Blues’. It’s one of Gareth’s most big-hearted declarations, evoking a love powerful and dangerous and fit to transcend the downfall of civilization – he’ll keep a garden alive in spite of all else. The first time I heard it was goosebump-inducing, the kind of thing that happens when you just sit back and have to say, “Damn, that’s a good song.” Gareth’s sister Kim sings lead on also-upcoming ‘kms’, and her vow to “lay down [her] life for any rat in the road” echoes his stated desire for “the trust of every animal”.
People seem to know the lyrics already to these new singles and absorb them almost as eagerly as the older pieces. They’re especially eager for ‘Straight in at 101’, and ‘The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future’, which bears the cadence of a dark nursery rhyme, bass ripping its way through the Paradise all the way up to the mezzanine. Gareth makes the shape of binoculars over his eyes with his hands, scanning the crowd from side to side. ‘A Psychic Wound’ from earlier calls back to this imagery of the sea as well, part of a discography that recontextualizes itself as the years go on, a body of work rather than discrete albums with no threads between them.
Some of the young people in the front wave their rainbow flags up between songs, and Gareth places one on a monitor wedge and wishes everyone a Happy Pride before they begin the next song, though the flag doesn’t remain for long, vibrated around by the volume of the music. In their nearly 20 years of bandhood, Los Campesinos! have never once wavered in their sheer intensity. Paisey has never shied away from exposing a side of human experience that is volatile, messy, scornful, and heartbroken – the seven-piece band together has created equally energized and emotional accompaniment to it. The lyrics have matured and don’t traffic quite as openly in the snark they once more regularly employed, but they’re no less impassioned, and neither is his delivery onstage, all seven bandmates alive in sound and performance.
The main set ends as it began with a new one: ‘0898 HEARTACHE’ (numbers a reference to a UK adult hotline of yesteryear) finds the Paisey siblings facing each other, each with a tambourine in hand, dancing and grinning in an instrumental passage when Gareth isn’t singing and Kim is away from her keys and flute. It closes the band’s set with one hell of an imperative: “Grind my bones into the finest snow” he instructs, describing how even the tree that would sprout from that bonemeal would bear rotten fruit. They return for a final trio of songs including the much-beloved ‘You! Me! Dancing!” which serves as the impetus for plenty of that. The night closes with Hello Sadness highlight ‘Baby I Got the Death Rattle’, one last big chorus to send everyone into the night, waiting until they return when we’ll have been able to ponder all of All Hell – with such a strong retinue of singles thus far, it’ll be a hard wait, but one that will almost certainly pay off.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux