As youthful ebullience often knows no bounds, Cardiff’s indie-pop wunderkinds Los Campesinos! offer “We are Beautiful, We are Doomed” a mere eight months after their debut album “Hold On Now, Youngster …” cemented their status as this year’s premier, precociously erudite band. The new record comes so quickly on the heels of the debut that the young U.K. band appears to release its sophomore slump even before passing freshman year.
The bookish indie-set received “Hold On Now, Youngster …” as one of the most welcome pop records of recent memory ““ a confetti-covered, gift-wrapped gem brimming at the edges with unfettered hooks, energy and enough sly witticisms to put the navel-gazing, hack-lyricist contemporaries of Los Campesinos! to shame. On that album, the sestet established their M.O. ““ a formula that they so thankfully do not abandon on their second album ““ of arrangements stuffed with buzz-saw guitars, strings, synths, and glockenspiels all vying to produce the most effervescent and euphoric sounds, while vocalists Gareth and Aleksandra “Campesinos!” yelped and cooed about romantic follies through a prism of literary and pop culture references.
The band’s MySpace-assisted ascendancy and incessant use of Internet slang entrench it firmly in the context of 2008. However, Los Campesinos!, from the band members’ Ramones-style fake surnames and lyrical allusions to John Hughes movies and Spider-Man comics, clearly aim to convey a universal and timeless adolescent experience. Even when the lyrics resort to the most nauseating bedroom-journal pathos, Gareth could still deliver a wry, self-deprecating quip to deflate any criticism of pretentiousness. While “We are Beautiful, We are Damned” largely follows the path forged by “Hold On Now, Youngster …,” the new album finds the band coarser and angrier than on its debut, resulting in a more visceral set of songs. The band largely retains its sense of dorky naivete and twee associations, but Gareth’s lyrical preoccupations have shifted from K Records and LiveJournal entries to blood and vomit, the guitars now hack with more fury, the beats break slightly harder, the synths buzz and squall a little more freely, and the childlike glockenspiels ““ well, at least the glockenspiels are pretty much the same.
The band makes no attempts to shade its less sunny disposition this time around. Gareth announces on the first couplet of opener “Ways to Make It Through the Wall”: “Think it’s fair to say that I chose hopelessness / And inflicted it on the rest of us.” The title track finds Gareth in a similarly depressive state, pining, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder / Fondness makes the absence longer,” before declaring the Hamlet-esque sentiment, “I cannot emphasize enough that my body is a / Badly designed, poorly put together vessel / Harboring these diminishing, so-called vital organs.” Gareth’s melancholia permeates the album, yet it is to the band’s credit that it saves the record from being pitiable or wretched while neither undermining the despondent lyrics nor restraining the trademark exuberance. While the songs on “We are Beautiful, We are Doomed” are rarely as gloriously unrestrained and cacophonic as on their previous album, the more taut, carefully layered arrangements here provide a more pensive, thoughtful counterpoint to the unrefined rush of joy of “Hold On Now, Youngster …”
If anything, “We are Beautiful, We are Doomed” suffers only in comparison to “Hold On Now, Youngster …” Album centerpiece “You’ll Need Those Fingers for Crossing,” which builds on a bubbling rhythm with lyrical violins and guitar-noodling worthy of Los Campesinos!’ heroes Pavement, may be one of the band’s most accomplished moments in song-writing, yet it still lacks the giddy madness of “You! Me! Dancing!” the obnoxiously infectious single that best encapsulates the band’s appeal. Yet despite any apparent shortcomings in comparison to “Hold on Now, Youngster …,” Los Campesinos!, in eight short months, have clearly progressed as a band and delivered 10 songs of crowd-pleasing pop euphoria. Not content to be merely underdeveloped, ignorant, stupid and happy as on their debut, “We are Beautiful, We are Doomed” serves as ample evidence that Los Campesinos! are well on their way to creating some of the smartest, most vital power-pop around.
E-mail Rinehart at rrinehart@media.ucla.edu.