Los Campesinos!

“I think we need more post-coital and less post-rock…”

‘Romance Is Boring’, the new album from Los Campesinos!, was born at dawn on a morning in October 2008, at a point on Brighton beach where the sea meets the sky in a smear of grey.

“It was the first day of the Shred Yr Face tour, and we’d travelled overnight on a tour bus from Cardiff,” remembers vocalist Gareth Campesinos! “I got up very early and went out to the beach. The idea started with just the image that you could see an infinite distance because there was no telling where the sea ended and the sky began. I was feeling particularly morbid at the time, and the words just came backwards from there.”

“She said one day to leave her, sand up to her shoulders waiting for the tide/To drag her to the ocean, to another sea’s shore/This thing hurts like hell… but what did you EXPECT?”

If you come to ‘Romance Is Boring’ with too many preconceptions about Los Campesinos!, please leave them at the door: this album may not be what you expect. Of course, the signs of a new, rejuvenated Campesinos! were there, if you were looking. Last year’s mini-album ‘We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed’, recorded in stolen moments out on the road in the US with Jeffrey Lewis and Parenthetical Girls, debuted a firmer, harder sound, the giddy sugar rush of ‘You! Me! Dancing!’ metabolised into nervous adrenaline and lyrics spiked with jealousy, angst and paranoia. But ‘Romance Is Boring’ feels like a band that’s – well, not so much grown up – let’s say ‘fully realised’.

Recorded in two legs, the first at Carriage House, Connecticut (where the Pixies produced and mixed Doolittle) and the second at Jason McGurr of Death Cab For Cutie’s new studio in Seattle, both with veteran producer John Goodmanson (Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Wu-Tang Clan) at the helm, it’s a record that’s bigger, deeper, more complex and more direct than anything Los Campesinos! have recorded to date. There are huge choruses (‘There Are Listed Buildings’) and squalling, Blood Brothers dissonance (‘Plan A’), sheets of twinkling electronic ambience (‘Coda: A Burn Scar In The Shape Of The Sooner State’) and more great lyrics than you could ever hope to pin down in a press release. Ask yourself this: how many indie bands make a second record that’s better than their first, and then make a third record that’s better than their second, all in little over 18 months? Think about that one for a bit.

Some lessons have been learnt out on the road. “At the end of the tour with No Age and Times New Viking, I asked Randy from No Age if he wanted to come on and play a song with us,” remembers LC!’s main songwriter, Tom Campesinos!. “But he was like ‘You guys have bridges and middle eights and stuff – I’m not sure I can do it!’ Hearing that made me want to write simpler, more direct songs – songs fun to do live, as much as anything. But although we’ll always want to write the perfect pop song, we’ll always want to stretch that term as well.”

And ‘Romance Is Boring’ does just that. Filled out with added brass, strings, drum machines and electronics, packed with guest spots from the likes of Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls and Jherek Bischoff of the Dead Science, it is nothing if not ambitious. The strings were composed by LC!’s in-house music graduate Harriet Campesinos!, who spent long evenings on tour locked away experimenting on Garageband. “I got completely carried away, layering multiple lines and trying out as many different techniques that I could muster,” she says. “John implicitly understood I wanted parts to work in different ways…  sometimes, a wash of sound, other times an intricate melodic line.”

“Every girl I ever kissed I was thinking of a pro-footballer/THOUGHT. YOU. SHOULD. KNOW.”

Perhaps the greatest leap on ‘Romance Is Boring’, though, is Gareth’s lyrics, which have attained a startling level of self-lacerating honesty and frank admission. “I’m a very different person to two and a half years ago. The music I’ve listened to since, the books I’ve read… the people I’m surrounded by are more depressed, more down about life. But while ‘We Are Beautiful…’ was pretty much biography – me writing about me –this one is me writing about other people that I know.” Asked who has influenced his lyric writing, Gareth cites not bands, but an author – BS Johnson, an English experimental novelist that wrote books like The Unfortunates and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. “He made a lot of breakthroughs, in typological techniques – he’d make holes in the paper so you could read twenty pages ahead. But his fiction was very truthful, and nearly everything he wrote was autobiographical.”

‘Romance Is Boring’ is also a swansong of sorts, a goodbye to the band’s beloved co-vocalist/keyboard player Aleks Campesinos!, who is leaving the band to return to full-time education. Filling the space onstage, though, is Kim Campesinos!, a new recruit who the band introduced to their fans with an online video that parodied of a football club signing, filmed with BBC sports presenter Sean Fletcher at Cardiff City football ground.

Los Campesinos! are good at being in a band. Everything they do, they do with care and attention to detail. It’s there in the way they communicate directly with fans online, and in their Record Box Project – a treasure trove of seven-inch records assembled from the indie record shops of the world and given away to a lucky fan – and in the small-press fanzines they make, just because. It was a phrase that showed up in one of those fanzines that eventually gave ‘Romance Is Boring’ its name.  “We didn’t have a title for the longest time,” says Tom. “But it just seemed to fit. It’s funny to me because so much of the album is the sound of this obsessive romantic, and the way it’s used can’t help but sound slightly unconvincing – ‘Like, romance is boring, I’m not interested in that anyway’. While of course, actually, it’s all-consuming.”

“If you were given the option of dying painlessly in peace at forty-five/But with a lover at your side, after a full and happy life/Is this something that would interest you/Would this interest you at all…?”