Welsh indie poppers return with their third album in little over 2 years.
Los Campesinos! – Romance Is Boring
RockOSaurus Says:
Los Campesinos! have beefed up the indie stakes as they combine every instrument ever invented from the kazoo to the string section and back via the vo-coder into soaring bliss-out spectacles. Superb melodies are the pivotal feature of this album and from my count, there are approximately one every thirty seconds!
Some like myself, will find lead vocals very irritating. Gareth’s whiny, jerky delivery just wears you down, plus he is is totally drowned out as soon as the whole band kicks in. Lyrically it feels like he has lost almost EVERYTHING, the endless spouting of loveless metaphors is material for the counselling sofa…hence it’s a good thing you can only hear him 50% of the time.
Glossing over the ‘we’re proper indie don’t you know’ mentality, the I really must learn to love myself lyrics and the fact I can’t sing, Romance Is Boring is a highly entertaining record with a multitude of flaws. Yet when you play it (repeatedly…I’ll admit it) it doesn’t seem to matter! Because despite trying really hard to be cool and deep, it’s just a great indie pop record which is hard to hate (trust me I’ve tried).
Mr Flowers Says:
These lyric-heavy indie-pop stalwarts have brass instruments and aren’t afraid to use them.
The lead singer sings like a surprisingly eloquent drunk man outside a pub after closing time, shouting at beleaguered passers-by about his woes about some ex-girlfriend, or ex-iPhone, or something, while on the brink of getting a bit too emotional. It’s a good job Aleksandra Campesinos! is on hand to lend a pretty singing-voice on a few of the tracks, else you might have found Gareth sobbing in some gutter by the end of the record.
It’s probably a matter of taste then, but this album is almost wall-to-wall with good songs – so, unless you have a particular aversion to the whole indie-pop genre (in which case you probably should have stopped reading when I SAID IT WAS INDIE-POP in the first sentence), Romance Is Boring gets two thumbs up.
RockOSaurus: 7/10
MrFlowers:8 /10
DoesItRock Overall Score: 7.5
Listen to Los Campesinos! – Romance Is Boring now on Spotify!
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