Invariably at the beginning of any young band’s career, its members have to decide what the future will look like for their group. Such decisions usually happen after the group’s first release; at that point the pressure’s off, they’ve gone in every direction that they cared to go and—while taking the reception of said release into account—the decision needs to be made as to which variation is the band’s best fit.
Such was the crossroads at which Los Campesinos! found itself following the release of their debut EP last year. The band’s debut found the group making up their own rules as they went along and fell between The Vaselines and Pavement (they even covered "Frontwards" on the EP) in the process, as both sound and vocal approach were playfully literate while pogoing ecstatically. Rather than change directions dramatically or take the wall of praise afforded the EP by critics to heart, Los Campesinos! have established themselves as the precocious, hyper-literate response to every band that takes itself entirely too seriously. The only carry-over songs from the Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP are "Don’t Tell Me To Do The Math(s)" and "You! Me! Dancing!," and those operate as the loose template for the other songs on this album; amid an incredibly dense wall of sound (the only word that quickly and effectively describes it is ‘festive’), singers Gareth and Aleks Campesinos trade lines on the mike in much the same way a comic duo does it on stage: while Aleks knocks out most of the one-liners and all of the sweet melodies, Gareth plays the straight-man that makes images of hand-wringing, twenty-something co-ed caricatures ("…And We Exhale And Roll Our Eyes In Unison"), realistic romantics ("We Are All Accelerated Readers") and self-important musicians ("This Is How You Spell ‘Hahaha, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux Romantics’") just that much better in their combination of over-the-top wordplay and simple pop progressions. Within the narrative structure of these songs, the singers play the protagonists that willfully relinquish control of their subjects and laugh as they immediately fall flat afterward and scramble to keep up. They always do though. Each song threatens to implode as the vocals start coming faster than vocal meter should allow, the instrumental parts begin to crunch together, and the pop vibes begin to deconstruct during the bridge of each song before miraculously and pristinely realigning even stronger as the band snaps into a sublime pop chorus that redeems both each song and the band themselves.
With the EP already on the books, Los Campesinos! were faced with the challenge of attempting to expand themselves in order to accommodate the size of a long-player without repeating what they’d done previously, in addition to living up to the hype that the EP created. Hold On Now, Youngster… does both of those things brilliantly; they saw the options available to them and decided to play off their first release’s smart vocal interplay while leaving enough space for to grow for future releases. Ultimately, the band made the perfect choice.
For more information visit www.loscampesinos.com or myspace.com/loscampesinos
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