In the frantic waning moments of ""You! Me! Dancing!,"" Los Campesinos! frontman Gareth Campesinos! hastily shouts, ""And we're just like how Rousseau depicts man in the state of nature: We're underdeveloped, we're ignorant, we're stupid but we're happy."" And that, in a nutshell, is an appropriate thesis for LC! at their onset. They re-invented twee pop, sprinkling teen angst on top of their signature brand of ebullient sonic candy. But what also reinforces the lyric's weight is that it foreshadowed the overt misery, melodramatic grandeur and tinted worldview on their latest, Romance is Boring.
Despite their claims to the contrary, LC! were never actually all that ignorant. In fact, their hyper-literacy was one of their most endearing qualities when they were still butting elbows with the rest of the MySpace universe. While their peers barked about the best party ever or meetings in treehouses, LC! warned us not to read Jane Eyre and whether or not a band's synthesizer was anything more than a crutch.
But six months after their debut, the post-twee manifesto Hold On Now, Youngster..., LC! took a step toward the more tragic thematic elements found on We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. It seems the semi-annual cycle didn't provide enough time for a full gestation, though, as WAB, WAD was only a preview to the kinds of heart-wrenching transitions the Welsh septet had in them.
At its heart, Romance is Boring is an album about the disingenuity of romanticized culture. On ""This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind,"" Gareth cries, ""They dragged me to the hospital sayin' I had gone deaf, but I heard everything they said / It's just I had no interest.""
More than any of their albums, Romance is Boring is a one-man show. And although Gareth continually explores several external topics, he always does so introspectively. It's no degradation of his lyrical acumen, but it is indicative of a shift to larger, more compelling ideas. Gareth's keen eye for detail is less focused, speaking in sweeping metaphors and life lessons instead of his trademarked attention to specifics.
But as he said on Hold On's ""Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks,"" ""When the smaller picture is the same as the bigger picture, you know that you're fucked;"" and on Romance is Boring, he's no longer as concerned with the smaller picture. And that's what makes Romance such a napalm-filled carboy of an album: It's what no fans would allow themselves to expect. LC! has taken the fateful leap off the ledge of quirky xylophone-led pop that force-feeds enthusiasm through speakers and plunged themselves deep into the fateful pool of honest, sincere and—most of all—vulnerable pop music.
But the heavier subject matter creates a new set of obstacles that LC! sometimes have a hard time tackling. Inside the album's infrequent valleys, Gareth wields his lyrical sword with reckless abandon at a crowd of delicate themes. The majority of the album eludes this cumbersome nature, though, when Gareth abandons his phallic preoccupation and lets his sexual frustration boil down to civilized discontent.
But while Gareth takes center stage, the success of his rants is dictated by the band's bubbly backbone. The individual elements are more jagged this time around, mirroring the more disenfranchised lyrics. But repeated exposure smooths the sandpaper distortion, exposing the band's powerful comaraderie. When done right, the septet alternate riffs within the same melody, occupying the same space like a Whac-A-Mole, shifting from guitar to glockenspiel to background vocals in a frenetic, euphoric seizure. They synthesize a symbiotic relationship, each instrument striking abundant glee when confronted with the prospect of sharing the limelight with its best friends.
But on songs like ""Romance is Boring,"" in which one element—in this case the guitar—dominates much of the action, they have a hard time taking off.
But that's nitpicking on an album that makes a habit of knocking you on your ass. Always self-aware, Gareth rues modernity on ""A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me to Charlotte,"" practically whining when he proclaims, ""They appropriated everything we ever loved, and dressed it up in quotations and fluff,"" and LC! seem intent on reversing this trend of gentrification and irony. They're holding post-modern society accountable for divorcing actions and aesthetic. As they suggest on ""This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind,"" it is a common occurrence in media that ""they said it smelled delicious but it smelled of burning flesh."" The over-friendly marketization of angst has eliminated its purpose, and, as they continue, that's ""not meant to be malicious, but this is the cross we bear.""
And that full-bodied perspective is what sets LC! apart from their contemporaries. Because, as Gareth's offhanded reference on their debut alluded to, the band's ultimate strength is that they do know exactly what's happening to them.
In the aforementioned Jean-Jacques Rousseau dialogues, the French thinker expands on the creation of civilization as a recognition of networks. Once man identifies these relationships he is finally cognizant of value. And once man establishes time, he acknowledges that these values are fleeting, which originates inadequacy. Always a jaded group, Los Campesinos! have crossed this line of human development and are now past preoccupying themselves with the rehearsed drama of post-modern society that divorces intention from action.
In the end, Romance is Boring likely isn't the definitive period piece for our generation's detachment, or even the likely favorite for album of the year. But its template for sonic experimentation, lyrical profundity and evocation of meaty issues through colloquial mannerisms and pedestrian humor raises the bar for literate pop. But most of all, their insistence on holding aesthetics accountable to actions propels a genre increasingly plagued with saturation by MTV offshoots programmed to market stud belts, guy-liner and overpriced hoodies back to its intended place as a haven for self-affirming truths and self-righteous enthusiasm.
