#I just know that letter was the most cringey poetic shit on the face of the planet

[cinnamontoastcrunch-15]

Today’s @wolfstarmicrofic prompt is father!

(112 words.)

“Remus, lovely, you’re panicking.” Lily said gently, an amused smile playing on her face as she folded herself onto Remus’ bed.

“Of course I’m bloody panicking! A letter? Who tells someone that they love them in a letter?!”

“Sirius, apparently.” She answered, watching Remus cover his face with his hands and groan. “You have to write something back, you-“

“Hey, you two.” Remus’ father’s voice rang out from the doorway, forcing Remus to sit up, Lily turning to face him. “Door open, please.” He watched them carefully, before moving away. Remus glanced at Lily, before promptly breaking down in laughter, dropping his head onto her shoulder as she laughed along with him.

[mint-sm]

LOS CAMPESINOS! REVIEW: Hold On Now, Youngster...

It’s been around a decade now since Los Camp’s formation and the release of “Hold on Now, Youngster…”, and it’s been kinda funny seeing this as a starting point for a band that would go onto making stuff like “No Blues” or the not-quite-new-but-most-recent “Sick Scenes.” The band, especially singer/lyricist/face of the band, Gareth Campesinos! is really not fond of this “twee-style” period they ended up being pigeonholed in for a while, and they don’t seem to have many nice things to say about it aside from maybe the 3-4 songs from this record they still play in live concerts (when I saw them, I think they only played 4, 2 of them were for the encore).

The kinda depressing or funny thing (you don’t have to pick just one) is that despite their animosity towards this period and this album in particular, it evidently struck a chord with their audience, since this album did pretty damn well critically and commercially as a first outing. It’s juvenile and innocent and kinda bordering on emo music with a serious addiction to the glockenspiel, but there’s something with these releases that did have a serious appeal, and probably not just because there were a lot of emo/indie scenesters in the mid-late 2000’s.

(IT'S SAD THAT YOU THINK THAT WE'RE ALL JUST SCENESTERS / AND EVEN IF WE WERE, IT'S NOT THE SCENE YOU'RE THINKING OF)

Now I can’t really speak for other people, but as for me, the reason why I’ve become so fond of it does sort of tie back into that whole “pop-revivalist” thing, in that it just felt so damn refreshing. This was made before the term “indie” became a meaningless household buzzword that came to define anything with some slightly lo-fi guitar gunk to it, and Los Camp have a legit life and vibrancy to them, almost kinda punk-ish at times, but with just enough glockenspiel, violin and clean-ass major guitar riffs for you to want to dance more than… I dunno, probably mosh, but honestly, they’d likely still be naturally too colorful to do that (just check out their cover of a Black Flag song from this era).

It’s not the most utterly original sound -- their 80’s-90’s twee and punk inspirations pretty clear, especially from their B-Sides and bonus tracks consisting of covers of their songs (including Heavenly, Black Flag and Pavement) -- but you know what, every band is someone’s first, and damnit I immediately fell in love with “You! Me! Dancing!” the first time I heard it, and it’s still an excellent representation of this band’s era. The epic minute and a half giant wall of sound intro, the tight, loud percussion, instantly catchy guitar riff (thanks for singing Pavement’s “Box Elder” in live shows so we know where you got that from, Gareth!), and charmingly memorable chorus and spoken word outro, it all works incredibly well.

I say “this era” though, because some of what makes Los Camp even better in my eyes, namely its ability to convey such conflicting emotions with lyrics and composition, is kinda lost here, and that’s probably a reason why Gareth dislikes this album so much. It feels very more in-your-face and visceral, especially in the light of how he’s gotten much more comfortable with a wittier, more self-deprecating style, especially with newer releases like “Sick Scenes,” which I can only believe was his goal since day 1.

That’s fine, and I get his frustration about being associated with “twee” shit, but the thing is that I still heavily appreciate it, not just because I have a soft spot for this cheesy, UK-based indie music, but because on its own, it’s still really, really good. Damn good. Honestly, while I do like the slightly-more complex, bit more focused and specific Los Camp, musically, this is probably one of my favorites, and certainly its most playfully enjoyable and raw.

(IF YOU CATCH ME WITH MY HANDS IN THE TILL / I PROMISE, SUGAR, I WASN'T TRYING TO STEAL / I'M JUST SWIMMING IN COPPER / TO SMELL AND PRETEND LIKE A ROBOT!)

I’ve found in comparing lyrics from this album to other releases, even including the next one released 8 months later, “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed,” is that they feel by far the most straightforward in their discography (aside from that “Sockets” EP). It’s not “simpler,” per se, because even back then, Gareth’s already managed to convey enjoyably-conflicting moods, such as the case with “This Is How You Spell ‘HAHAHA, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics’” (why yes, the entire title does appear in the lyrics!), and “We Are All Accelerated Readers,” which manage to contain kinda smarmy self-righteousness, but have an incredibly cathartic and gleeful “HAHAHA, FUCK YOU”-ness and a moody disillusionment and listlessness, respectively.

No, what I mean by “straightforward” is pretty much that Gareth doesn’t seem like so much he’s dancing around certain concepts, like it doesn’t feel like ambiguously dodging topics about death or failing relationships or the like underneath his obscure references and wordplay and stuff. Rather, here he’s preferring to confront those matters upfront and kinda shout at his targets. It gets both pretty heartbreaking but also darkly amusing in “Knee Deep at ATP,” where he recounts discovering a girl he meets at the titular festival is already in a relationship through a love letter, where his focus is “for each correctly used apostrophe / I could feel my heart sink inside my chest in front of me.”

Overly direct? Maybe, but it still paints a pretty clear image and mood, and is actually pretty charming, especially as the song starts up with its vivid energy, then trailing into an uncharacteristically (but not unappreciably) slow and melodic twing-twanginess and violin section before slowly building back up again to that energy as the band screams “���Not what you like, but what you're like as a person’ /  Well, I need new hobbies, that's one thing for certain!” There’s a reason why Los Camp still seems to like this song and play it after all these years.

Another example of that simple-but-sweet-ness is “My Year In Lists,” where we get this really punchy, playful percussion and verses with this girl, I think is Aleks Campesinos!, gleefully shouting alongside Gareth as he details his long-distance relationship through snail-mail, how “You said, ‘Send me stationary to make me horny’ / So I always write you letters in multicolours /  Decorating envelopes for foreplay / Damn extended metaphors, I get carried away”. It’s ridiculously indie and twee and sardonic as hell, especially as the chorus repeatedly goes “I cherish with fondness the day (before) I met you,” but I fucking love it.

(MY YEAR IN LISTS / STOMPING ON YOUR FINGERS AS YOU'RE CLINGING ON TO THE ABYSS)

Oh yeah, other thing to mention is the occasional duet vocalist, Aleks Campesinos! (Aleksandra Berditchevskaia), who was featured very prominently in early Los Camp songs until her departure around Hello Sadness. Vocals have always been a bit of a weird thing for a long time, and up until Gareth really and suddenly got his shit together with “Sick Scenes” (really, compare any song from this album to “5 Flucloxacillin”), most of the charm with the vocals came from not being very good, but still heartfelt and poetic (which granted, he himself admitted was still technically not very good, and also a reason why he doesn’t like this album).

However, Aleks was able to consistently provide a great contrast for the many call-and-response duets in this album, such as with the AWESOME opener, “Death to Los Campesinos!” and later "...And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison,” which really take advantage of her much smoother, more melodic voice to provide the band’s massively conflicting themes, and they would continue to do that for future albums. Though at times even she can’t escape the occasional cringey off-keyness, especially with "Don't Tell Me to Do the Math(s)," which considering how its themes are probably TOO basic for it to be really forgivable, is the only track I normally skip listening to this album.

(WE KNOW THAT WE COULD SELL YOUR MAGAZINES / IF ONLY YOU WOULD GIVE YOUR LIFE TO LITERATURE / JUST DON'T READ JANE EYRE)

But another thing that I really like about this album is just how it flows so damn well from song to song without any of them being too samey or too sticked-out. It’s able to sinewave really well from starting off, again, with the bombastic and catchy “Death to Los Campesinos!”, then suddenly escalating with the even-more louder, shouty "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats" before it suddenly decrescendos and slows down to fit the mood of “Don’t Tell Me To Do the Math(s),” etc., all climaxing with “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks,” which is frankly the  band’s loudest, catchiest, most harmonious, most epic closer track in their discography (okay, technically there’s an unlisted bonus track called "2007: The Year Punk Broke (My Heart)", but I count that more as an epilogue, though it’s still awesome). There’s simply never a dull moment.

(AND IT HITS AS HARD AS A BLOW TO THE HEAD / OR A SMASH TO THE SKULL, OR A KNEE TO YOUR CHEST / AND SWEET DREAMS, SWEET CHEEKS / OH, TOMORROW, OH, TOMORROW, OH, TOMORROW)

Is it the most complex thing this band has to offer? Probably not, but it more than makes up for it in my eyes for its sheer raw energy. Gareth and the band itself might not look kindly on this because it doesn’t fit the wittier, more mature goals they’d later reach with future releases, and this is probably is something they’d rather mostly forget, but at the same time, it still accomplished something that made people want to care about this Cardiff joint.

It provided them with one hell of an avenue to speak their early concepts of brewing brilliance, and sure, audiences probably didn’t realize at the time just what they would later be capable of, but as is, it’s still a fantastic album that stands very well alone, even as an admitted black-sheep relic as it exists 10 years later.

It’s also amusingly ironic, since within this album itself, Gareth himself says in the awesome spoken-word outro to “You! Me! Dancing!” that “On the way home, it always seems like a good idea to go paddling in the fountain, and that's because it IS a good idea, and we're just like how Rousseau depicts man in the state of nature: We're undeveloped, we're ignorant, we're stupid, but we're happy.”  Is it as adolescent, at-times willingly pretentious and overly saccharine as Gareth makes it out to be? Eh, maybe, but be damned if it doesn’t manage to convince us (maybe unintentionally so, but still) that the idea of jumping in that fountain is an awesome one. (4.5/5)

FAVES: “Death to Los Campesinos!,” “My Year in Lists,” “Knee Deep at ATP,” “We Are All Accelerated Readers,” “You! Me! Dancing!” “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks,” “2007: The Year Punk Broke (My Heart)”