Los Campesinos

al check yr mails

it's ok. i sent them an e-mail with my proof of purchase and they're supposedly going to get it sorted, according to gareth's twitter.

cool.

one day i would like to enjoy a full album by these guys as much as i enjoy the first three songs of we are beautiful, we are doomed

the new single really grew on me, though

A band I always liked who are a bit like these, but imo better (not to mention Spanish language) are La Casa Azul. Anyone know em?

one day i would like to enjoy a full album by these guys as much as i enjoy the first three songs of we are beautiful, we are doomed

the new single really grew on me, though

― mutant slow drum (BradNelson), Friday, 4 November 2011 19:38 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

they did this! it is: the rest of we are beautiful, we are doomed

you can lead a horse to water but it won't drown itself

omg.

so far i think i like this more than i did romance is boring the first time i heard that. dunno if anything will smack me across the face like straight in at 101 or we got yr back tho.

yeah i <3 that line

i'm really looking forward to gareth posting the lyrics online

if i werent busy playing fm12 and about to go to work, i'd go all jordan-as-2008-gucci-fan-of-the-year on this shit

this thread title needs an exclamation point already.

What he said. Still my favourite LC! release, although the other two LPs are close behind

Have my download code now. Listening to it. Three tracks in. My reaction is less intense that it was to Romance is Boring but it's all good so far.

Beautiful/Doomed is still my favourite rather.

Oh wow. The last half of the album is really something special.

This is streaming on NPR right now. Listened to it last night, perfectly OK but samey? voc grates a little.

morbs!

what, I'm not allowed to listen to new albums now?

That feeling of hearing "By Your Hand" again for the first time in five or six weeks... pretty great.

i love it when morbs turns up talking about bands i love (he was p vocal too when i started a thread for that last disappointing magnetic fields record iirc). i also find american politics p lame, so if only i had more knowledge of olde timee movies, i feel like we could be ilx bros.

what, I'm not allowed to listen to new albums now?

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, November 8, 2011 4:22 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest

no it's awesome, i just didn't know that you had any idea who LC! are

I haven't even heard that last disappointing magnetic fields record

lol it was v forgettable whether you heard it or not. but you talk about tmf and discuss their tour dates within that thread.

(memories of one of the first threads i started not about football)

After exhausting the first three albums on a ravenous kick this week I returned to Hello Sadness, wondering if I might appreciate it some more with distance. I didn't. What a flat, disappointing album. "Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)" has got to be the worst song they've ever written. Like, I get that you like soccer, but why put a very literal song about that fandom in the middle of an album? Do you have any sense of what it is you do anymore?

ha i like that song a lot. soccer is pretty central to the LC! experience & idk... i think the way gareth writes about romance applies well to sports too

i'm split on which of the last two albums i like better. the first two are clear standouts to me.

"to tundra" is one of the best songs they've ever written tho. & "by your hand" was a great single.

EDAD is barely about football dude.

in fact the whole album he seems to have turned down the footer references. or sport in general. edad is about his parents divorce, it is just half framed around watching football. songs about yr girlfriend has a reference to kit. by yr hand has a snooker reference.

it is less great than the other 3 but it has by yr hand, hello sadness, edad, life is a long time and baby i got the death rattle which may be my favourite lc! song so...

its like they made a 7.5/10 record instead of the 9s and 10s the others were. not a huge deal.

Soccer has always been background coloring on LC!'s albums (as, to a greater extent, has music fandom and scenesterism), fun details that fleshed out the songs and gave a sense of Gareth's greater tastes and interests and made him seem like more than the sum of his orneriness and heartbreak. And I get that in some of Gareth's most wry lyrics all of those concerns have exaggerated, world-ending significance, but to actually dedicate a whole song to soccer just confuses everything thematically. I mean, this is a breakup album. Imagine if, like, Marvin Gaye had sandwiched a song about how the Tigers were having a crappy season into Here My Dear, putting that disappointment on the same plane as his withering love.

"By Your Hand" is a classic LC single, and "To Tundra" is really graceful, so Hello Sadness closes with some dignity, but the middle section is so soggy and uninspired. Romance is Boring is by far the better album; the prose and storytelling on the record are so much more biting and effusive. For all its sprawl, everything on that album is so alive.

This one family photograph
Always floats to the top
Like a beaming, bloated corpse
Though having been made up
My memories are sepia
But the photograph is not
An historian is fucking with them
As deadly as garrotte

Where they're standing in the kitchen
With his arms around her waist
With no idea of what's to come
And a smile across your face
And all the fittings are the same
But every other thing has changed
Must forget everything you know
As though your mouth and tongue estranged
Small comforts found in ABBA Gold
And electronic chess
When West Clewes was my Waterloo
My most dramatic test
Now I've been walking down the shortcuts
And the alleys in the dark
Because I'm not scared of the shadows
They're no blacker than my heart

These things rattle round my head
If he hasn't blown the whistle
Then it isn't quite the end.

---

How is this not about his parents divorce and instead "about how the Tigers were having a crappy season"?

Seems to me like he's using the divorce as a metaphor for soccer, not the other way around, right? Because a soccer defeat is a very inadequate metaphor for your parents' crushing divorce; when you reverse that equation you a least get some absurd humor from the asymmetry of the comparison

Nah it is about him remembering a time when they were getting divorced as he also goes to watch England get beat with his dad. Also THAT game* (which half the first verse eludes to) was pretty crushing on a lot of people, and to use it as what should have been a distraction and instead was a punch in the nuts just adds to the weight imo. idk i guess i find it easier relating considering i would have been the same age, with the same england football enthusiasm, going through a parents divorce.

*Argentina 2 - 2 England with Argentina winning on penalties, obv. It is about a legendary a game of sport gets. It made a national hero (Michael Owen). It made an international villain (David Beckham). Two penalties within the first 15 minutes. It had beautiful bits of skill and two especially great goals, one which was a true sucker punch free kick routine by Argentina. It had England (Sol Campbell iirc?) seemingly score the winning goal and have it disallowed. And then of course penalties.

Honestly I think that game was a big turning point in how the country viewed a ton of things, sport and celebrity and national support etc. There hasn't really been national support of a sporting figure like Owen got that night since Farah/Ennis last month, we kinda just took 14 years off.

Also didn't help that we'd been to war with them a decade ago.

Basically go watch that game. It used to be on youtube.

I tip my hat and walk back some of my criticisms; that's a really solid read of the song. (I still hate this song, to be sure, but I'll blame that more on the UK/USA culture gap than any songwriting shortcomings.)

every time i listen to the latest album, i'm surprised by how solid it is and how much i like it, but i don't feel compelled to put it on the way i did romance is boring and certainly don't adore it the way i did wab/wad

i never picked up on the divorce part

its in the name

that is certainly true.....

task force https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41wqBPc1_g&feature=youtu.be

thanks for posting! is this a new album? must investigate this. whatever it is, i'm digign it.

yeah upcoming

ASSEMBLE

https://soundcloud.com/los-campesinos/what-death-leaves-behind/s-jDNo5

this song is GREAT

WE WILL FLOWER AGAIN

holy fuck. What a song. John Goodmanson's production on this is just incredible.

Why must I lie awake, from dusk until the morning, through fear of bein' impaled upon errant mattress spring?
Within a waking dream I finally made my heel turn, lived life as Super 8 when you were promised Hilton
Propose me as a pardon for sins, led on barbecue I'm burnt offerings
I proof-read the Book of Job for the Lord: edit one, League Cup 2004
We, delicate as a filigree, cleared a place for us in the chicory
Colosseum blood will dry in the sun (is it true...?)

GOAT

Why must I lie awake, from dusk until the morning, through fear of bein' impaled upon errant mattress spring?

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

Why yes I will post the tracklist

1. For Flotsam
2. What Death Leaves Behind
3. A Portrait Of The Trequartista As A Young Man
4. Cemetary Gaits
5. Glue Me
6. As Lucerne/The Low
7. Avocado, Baby
8. Let It Spill
9. The Time Before The Last Time
10. Selling Rope (Swan Dive To Estuary)

Avocado, Baby > Picasso, Baby

is this their optimistic album?