This is how I spell “A little sincerity wouldn’t hurt”
Written: Apr 23 '08 (Updated Apr 23 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Los Campesinos! are cooler than you.
Cons: They feel the need to make you feel like shit for it.
The Bottom Line: From one hipster douchebag to another: Can't we all just get along? Also, your music rocks, but your attitude sucks.
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| headlessparrot's Full Review: Hold on Now, Youngster... by Los Campesinos! |
Allow me to explain a pet theory which is only tangentially related to my understanding of the Welsh septet Los Campesinos! (that’s Spanish for “the peasants”) and their debut LP, Hold On Now, Youngster. It goes as follows, that the ultimate embodiment of egotism (and/or narcissism) in rock and roll occurs when successful artists get their very own label imprint, and immediately proceed to sign bands that sound exactly like themselves. Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst is the easiest target for this – but Fred Durst is an easy target for almost any kind of criticism. The most obvious example today, though, is probably Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz, who ran right out and signed Panic! At The Disco (or Panic At The Disco!; I’m not sure where they’re placing the exclamation mark these days), despite (or more likely because) they’re being the exact same band. Lest you think I’m picking on the obvious marks, I’ll concede – and this is actually nearer to my point – that it’s something that even truly great bands are guilty of, if only on a smaller scale. Even Broken Social Scene, that paragon of indie virtue, has used their self-administrated label (Arts & Crafts) to sign a bevy of collaborators who sound just like themselves. In many respects, The Most Serene Republic (Arts & Crafts’ first recruitment from outside of the original collective’s ranks) is their nerdy, Dungeons & Dragons alter ego, the mathletes to Broken Social Scene’s laidback stoners.
Which brings me to Los Campesinos! It’s very tempting to categorize the most recent addition to the Arts & Crafts roster as Broken Social Scene’s twee-as-fuck cousin – similar aesthetic sensibility, but a lot quirkier, with no one being quite sure whether those eccentricities stem from being foreign, or just from being weird. This is the verbose way of saying, in any event, that I really like Los Campesinos!, but I’m unclear as to why. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate: I know why I really like Los Campesinos!, but part of me simply loathes myself for doing so. Moreover, I like their full-length debut – coming just months on the heels of an introductory EP, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, which showcased a few of the same songs – but I have reservations about it that reflect an ambivalence which has been lacking in the near unanimous praise that Hold On Now, Youngster has received. I just can’t bring myself to give it my full endorsement (yet).
The truth is that it’s not surprising that Hold On Now, Youngster has received such glowing endorsements (a median score of 81 on Metacritic suggests that it will find a home on at least a few year-end lists). It has all the hallmarks of a beloved album – big-hearted, quirky, complex, musically lush, lyrically dense, energetic, eccentric, and so on. And it’s true that Hold On Now, Youngster is all of these things (and maybe more).
Gareth Campesinos’ voice may be my lone objective criticism of the band: I like unconventional voices, but Gareth’s delivery – a bafflingly unappealing blend of “yelping,” “nasal,” and “whiny” – is just too much. But more subjectively, I have a whole host of issues that complicate my feelings toward the band. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that Hold On Now, Youngster isn’t good, or even great – I’m fully prepared to admit that my ambivalence toward it is not reflective of some languishing flaw that no one before me has recognized. I like the album enough to know that that’s not the case. And I know, furthermore, that I should like the album even more than I do, because it’s true that it does linger on all of those critical buzzwords. What I am suggesting – if I am suggesting anything – is that in celebrating Los Campesinos!, critics have glossed over (or even celebrated) some of their more problematic tendencies, both musically and ideologically. Hold On Now, Youngster poses a problem, because it’s difficult for me to go against the critical consensus when I’m struggling so mightily to verbalize exactly why I feel differently. It’s compounded by the fact that I can see exactly where the glowing praise is coming from, and that I find myself wanting to like it more than I do. And maybe this is just like Destroyer (the full-time project of part-time New Pornographer Dan Bejar), who I appreciate more in theory than in practice. But whatever the case, I feel compelled to write (as I often am), if only to clarify my own feelings.
Because – and I’m prepared to get ripped to shreds for this – Los Campesinos! sound to my admittedly untrained ears an awful lot like that other, aforementioned exclamation mark-friendly band, Panic At The Disco!. Not unmistakably so, but a close enough affinity exists to raise questions about why one is so readily embraced while the other is so haphazardly dismissed. I’ll even admit that this is something I’m guilty of. The very fact that I’m willing to return to Hold On Now, Youngster for a second look – while my distaste for Panic At The Disco! knows no limits – suggests that I’m a victim of the same thinking. But the truth, I think, is that the groups are ultimately pretty different. Even if I am the one making the initial comparison, I think multiple listens don’t bear it out; the easy comparison is not always the right one. Hold On Now, Youngster exhibits an almost pop-punk sensibility that’s easy to latch onto, but its level of complexity and hyperactive spasticity suggests the true influences are found in the realm of twee (Belle & Sebastian) and indie rock (labelmates Broken Social Scene). Indeed, Hold On Now, Youngster musically synthesizes the best of many worlds, marrying the precocious with the chaotic – resulting in densely layered instrumental shapes (think Broken Social Scene’s “Almost Crimes”) that still sound, somehow, pretty fucking adorable.
But that doesn’t mean that Los Campesinos! aren’t inviting comparisons. Which is a silly and shallow thing to criticize a band for, but which – I will posit – leads to a more significant point about the way Los Campesinos! operate. The band’s propensity for exclamation marks and circuitously longwinded song titles (see “This Is How You Spell ‘HAHAHA, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics’” for Hold On Now, Youngster’s most viscerally painful example), and even their general sound are almost knowingly evocative of Fall Out Boy and/or Panic At The Disco!. But lead Campesinos! Gareth has gone on record as suggesting that you can identify “the morons” as the ones who call their penchant for lengthy song titles and exclamation marks as “Fall Out Boy-esque” rather than “Ballboy or Ten Grand-esque.” So I suppose that I’m a moron. Nevertheless, my issue with this appropriately derisive defence is that Los Campesinos! are pretty much dangling a carrot by inviting these comparisons and then pulling them away at the last moment. They know how obscure Ballboy and Ten Grand are (only one of the two even has a Wikipedia page, for what it’s worth), so when someone calls them on the obvious – if somewhat superficial – similarities, they can just snatch back the carrot and revel in their holier-than-thou hipsterdom. The problem is that doing so doesn’t change the fact that there are comparisons to be made for reasons that move beyond a love of punctuation and titular verbosity.
My point: ultimately, the problem is less about the similarities (because they don’t hold up to scrutiny) than it is about the band’s insular hipster disingenuousness. The net result is that it’s not possible to take Hold On Now, Youngster at face value, to listen to it openly, and to take it at for what it is without feeling like the joke is on you. That disingenuousness turns a set of eleven otherwise chaotically beautiful and sweetly smart songs into a forty-one minute celebration of hipster douchebaginess, self-conscious referentiality, and what it means to try too hard. Even their name – each of the group’s seven members uses the Campesinos! (exclamation intact) surname – becomes a farce: is it a tribute to the Ramones? Is it a tribute to a band more obscure than the Ramones? Is it just supposed to be cute? Is it ironic? It becomes impossible to tell, and one wonders whether the group is just waiting for someone to make the logical leap – to the Ramones – before they’re laughed out of the room for being “morons” (because obviously it’s not a tribute to the Ramones, that would be too obvious). The image-consciousness here is so pervasive that it’s difficult to appreciate Hold On Now, Youngster on its own merits. It is as though no one told the group that even being signed to Arts & Crafts in the first place is more or less a free pass to a lifetime of indie credibility. If they’d have done so, it would have given Los Campesinos! free reign to drop the snark and emphasize what makes them so great anyway. Instead, all they’ve really done is upped the levels of irony and hipster snark to a embarrassing levels of near self-parody.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for irony and snark – they’re my own personal defence mechanisms against authenticity. But they’re modes that don’t translate well to music in large doses, precisely because music is at its best when it is at its most earnest. And sincerity and irony are (for the most part) anathema to one another, thus making it impossible to read anything really compelling or insightful into Hold On Now, Youngster’s more self-reflexively derisive lyrical tangents. The music is ecstatically wonderful – I can count on few fingers artists who incorporate the violin and the glockenspiel into their regular sonic arsenal, and do it without sounding like they’re doing it just for the sake of doing it – but so much of the lyrical content is reducible to hipster references that will be dated in five years (“Knee Deep At ATP”) and predictable satirizations of indie pop’s soul-baring sincerity (the non-album single “The International Tweexcore Underground”).
It’s almost comedic that Los Campesinos! are so ready to mock others’ earnestness when they’re so plainly uncomfortable with showing their own – especially given that when they do betray a hint of unaffectedness, it pretty much illustrates how far off-base the shallowness of their satirized vision is. There’s an interesting parallel, I think, to be made with another indie rock band, the Weakerthans, whose conscious lack of irony have damned them to middling reviews from the same critics that have spent 2008 fawning over the disingenuous irony of Los Campesinos!. I wrote of the collective indifference toward the Weakerthans that “this [hipster] audience has a difficult time taking Samson and his band at face value, and so assume the worst… There’s no room left for the possibility that the Weakerthans are instead just the earnest yield of a likeminded artist… Disliking [them] is an easy, knee-jerk reaction that illustrates, I think, the hipster fear of addressing ones’ own insecurities. If you can only appreciate things on an ironic level, after all, you can never experience anything genuine.” The overwhelmingly positive critical response toward Hold On Now, Youngster, to me, illustrates the other side of this coin – the celebration of a record for what should, by all rights, be a deficiency. I could understand these positive reviews if they focused on the flawless arrangement of the album’s compositions (seriously, glockenspiel!), or its gleefully taut nervous energy (and some have). But that so many have cheered on – even basked in – Hold On Now, Youngster’s deliberate snobbery is considerably more troubling.
(Did I mention that I can’t stand Gareth Campesinos!’ voice? Because I can’t. I will concede, however, that Los Campesinos! female vocalist, Aleksandra, is – by contrast – pretty much beyond reproach.)
Anyway, the most depressing thing is that there’s a lot of good to be had, if it weren’t couched in such self-defeating sentiments. Indeed, Hold On Now, Youngster’s best moments (although musically, they’re all pretty great) are its most sincere. It should be plainly obvious that the band members are, in their heart of hearts, dorks – and when that sensibility comes through unadulterated, things are just swell. To quote Pitchfork Media’s review, which is still at least partially correct: “Los Campesinos! pack their songs with lyrical specificity, only their lives are apparently full of internet surfing, indie fandom, and absurd humour. "Stick with the imprints / With the hieroglyphics that the fan club sent us," Gareth Campesinos! hollers with every exclamation point in his young being on "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats", which claps into an Aleksandra Campesinos!-sung chorus about Spiderman.”
Comic book fandom and pop culture references (for a fun game, count the references to The Breakfast Club, K Records, and LiveJournal), though, apparently aren’t hip enough, because Hold On Now, Youngster ultimately descends, before long, into a morass of irony and sarcasm that makes it impossible to sort the serious from the hipster posturing. It is as though the septet is uncomfortable with their bookish dorkiness, and feels the need to disguise any trace of earnestness with a slathering of ironic self-effacement and crude disdain of others. Thus, we have lines like “I spent the last seven years perched on the edge of my bed / Scratching ‘I am incredibly sincere’ into my forearm,” (“…And We Exhale And Roll Our Eyes In Unison”) which are hilarious in isolation, but tedious when they set the tenor for an entire album. Even that reference to The Breakfast Club (on “We Are All Accelerated Readers”) is a loaded gun of detached irony: “And no more conversations about what Breakfast Club character you’d be / I’d be the one that dies.” When informed that “no one dies,” the appropriate response becomes “Well then what’s the point?” On “You! Me! Dancing!” Gareth snidely observes “And it’s sad that you think that they’re all just scenesters / (And even if we were, it’s not the scene you’re thinking of).”
Maybe I’m just frustrated. Or maybe I’m just being too harsh, because nestled between the obnoxiousness, as I’ve already mentioned, there is still some wonderful lyricism, and some nuanced observation. When he drops the veneer of casual indifference, Gareth reveals the heart of an author, spinning stream-of-conscious narratives and weaving extended metaphors in a startlingly literary manner: “This Is How You Spell ‘HAHAHA, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics” is almost worth the intolerable refrain for its verses, which are rendered in such immaculate metaphorical detail – “I notice the goosebumps on your arms, millions / And whether it's because of the numbers of hours spent laid facedown on my bed listening to / White noise, or, well, obviously it's not, I somehow manage to translate them from Braille.” He adds, in continuation, “The trails on your skin spoke more to me than the reams and reams of half finished novels you'd / Leave lying all over the place.” “Knee Deep At ATP,” elsewhere, heightens the slow-burning tension of its melancholic violin swells with the (for once) dead-on observation that “They said ‘it’s not what you like, it’s what you’re like as a person.’” It occurs to me that Los Campesinos! would be well-served in reflecting on their own lyricism here – because Hold On Now, Youngster is marred by its being more interested in credibility than genuineness. There’s a balance to be struck between irony and earnestness; Hold On Now, Youngster misses it – but I will concede that there’s hope they’ll ultimately get it right. If what they’re doing now, that is, is explicitly wrong. Maybe it isn’t. Your mileage may vary, depending on your tolerance for oblique self-importance.
I’m not sure whether it’s fortunate or unfortunate that it’s still hard to dislike Los Campesinos! in spite of their asshole-ishness. And you can chalk that up to its joyous instrumental accoutrements, its gleeful energy, melodic abandon, and affection for loosely organized musical chaos. Multi-voice harmonies, boy-girl lyrical duels (prominently featuring Aleksandra Campesinos!, who I rather wish was the band’s full-time vocalist), thickly glazed layers of instruments (guitar over synth over bass over violin over glockenspiel), and a complete lack of inhibition point to the sheer euphoric joy of Los Campesinos!’ music, something that could never be fully deflated by the lyrical distance of its hipster indifference – no matter how hard they might try.
The snark doesn’t make Hold On Now, Youngster any less brilliant in the temporal sense. Outside of those isolated moments of lyrical clarity, though, its concerns are so petty that I can’t see much use for the album outside of the here and now. Except, maybe, as a historical document of hipster douchebaginess (douchebaggery?) in the year 2008. And, maybe, of how a band can get one thing so right and something else so glaringly wrong. If Los Campesinos! ever figure out that their insular insincerity is only a barrier to appreciating an otherwise incredible – and incredibly inimitable – band, they’ll go even further than they already have. Which is a scary thought, because for all its self-absorption, and for all the ways that its image-conscious subtext grates on me, Hold On Now, Youngster might still end up being one of the best records of 2008. So maybe I am ready to give Hold On Now, Youngster my full endorsement. I merely reserve the right to criticize its shortcomings while lauding its greatness.
I demand my cake, and I wish to eat it as well. So the real moral of the story is that I’m not above cognitive dissonance.
Recommended:
Yes
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headlessparrot
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Member: Bryan Jansen
Location: Ontario, Canada
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Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite?
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