In spite of pouring rain, a queue for a show is snaked halfway around the block surrounding The Sinclair in Cambridge, MA, past multiple restaurants and businesses, and into the large alley that holds yet more storefronts and Harvard offices – and even that space is filling rapidly. In the foyer things are much the same, the line just for merch flooding the normally-ample space until it backs up in front of the box office. Not every show draws this volume of earlybirds, especially in such dismal weather, but all the way from Wales, Los Campesinos! have done just that. Touring with American art-prog trio Proper. it’s a hell of a duo on the lineup, especially if you’ve purchased stock in band names that end with punctuation marks.
Up first, Proper. have the kind of deeply-personal lyrics that make them an apt companion for Los Campesinos! Erik Garlington’s open-book examinations on sex, national and racial identity, and growing up in modern America make for potent subject matter that visibly wins the band a sizeable number of new fans from the LC! crowd. Garlington’s stage banter is genial even on his self-confessed three hours of sleep – and makes the case for the uninitiated to explore the band’s three albums, each with its own loose conceptual focus.
Los Campesinos! are between album cycles for the moment, six under their belt and another in development, but in 2021 they did release Whole Damn Body, a freshened-up selection of some hard-to-find B-sides from the era of Hello Sadness, released ten years prior. It’s a treasure trove for those who have followed the band for some time, a time capsule back to 2011, one of the band’s most fertile eras. “One of,” however, is a key phrase in that last sentence, as the band has multiple albums long since enshrined in the halls of essential indie-rock and emo synthesis. The band’s breakout came during a musical landscape in the mid-and late-00s when creative neurons were firing electrical signals across every synapse for both LC! and so many other bands: what if there was a xylophone on the track? What about gang vocals? Or strings? What if all the titles were lengthy, esoteric, grandiose ponderings or declarations, often on the subject of death? All these things apply here, and with a string of celebrated releases from that decade into the next, Los Campesinos! came to define a sound that built extensively on their niche “twee pop” origins into something far more enduring.
Led by singer Gareth Paisey, the band that takes the stage is the same seven-piece that has been LC! since roughly 2014, the sizeable number of members and even greater amount of instruments are also a characteristic of the indie-x sound born around that time. Throughout the night they take a tour through their entire back catalog, and one of the lasting impressions left is just how seamlessly songs like ‘Allez les Blues’ – an inversion of a French football chant – and ‘She Crows’, drawn from Whole Damn Body, fit into the set. It’s hard to imagine what caused them to end up on the cutting-room floor in the first place, especially the latter of those two with its simultaneously hysterical and scathing labeling of groupies as “finger-sucking, singer-fucking”. That one, in particular, is also a member of a multi-album saga of songs subtitled “Documented Emotional Breakdown #…”, so longtime LC! fans are likely ecstatic to have the fourth entry in that series available through a wide release at long last.
Early in the night, Paisey addresses the audience before ‘What Death Leaves Behind’, saying it’s, “one of three songs we’ll play tonight with the word ‘death’ in the title,” well aware of the tendency toward the maudlin that’s marked their career. But the band has been anything but one-note, their writing ever sharp and their instrumentals varied. Take set-closer ‘Avocado, Baby’ – “heart of stone, rind so tough it’s crazy” – what’s in the no man’s land in the middle not much of consequence, pitch-shifted echoes of that refrain rising over the top of the song. Or perhaps one of those other morbidly-monikered songs, ‘A Slow, Slow Death’, which in contrast to the prior one’s fuzzy, steady rock sensibility is led by an unconventional acoustic cadence, though they both – quite differently – leverage the band’s penchant for call-and-response vocals. For the bright and celebratory ‘You! Me! Dancing!’, Kim Paisey – sister of Gareth – takes up a flute to add another layer of melody.
Towards the close of the night, Gareth ruminates a bit on how the band has been an entity since all the way back in 2006, saying to the crowd that the group is “older than some of you’. He spares a moment to talk about the importance of all-ages shows like this, a staple of UK music culture, and in no uncertain terms says that if bands are choosing not to play all-ages shows, they’re making a deliberate – and presumably regrettable – choice. It would honestly feel truly wrong for an LC! to not play to a crowd of all ages; over 22 years their music has immortalized a comprehensive timeline of emotion, from being undeveloped, ignorant, stupid, but happy on a disco dancefloor to the various artifacts of bitterness and breakdowns accrued with aging. Gareth, like members of so many great bands, also recounts how Los Campesinos! played their first Boston gig at the dearly-departed dive Great Scott, which prompts a chorus of cheers in the seminal venue’s memory from the audience.
Fittingly, the band ends the evening with the prophesied third song with “death” in the title, ‘Baby I’ve Got the Death Rattle’, taken from Hello Sadness. Its pointed, incredibly-specific imagery is Paisey at his most dejected; and in that feeling, that uncompromisingly-portrayed low point, a listener can truly feel the echoes of that sentiment reverberate in their own life.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux