Song of the Week
Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
For the last few months I’ve building up a huge folder of music that I wanted to add to my ipod, and was trying to stagger, 30 or 40 albums at a time. Then this week I finally said ‘fuck it’ and added all 15Gb to iTunes at once.
And while meticulously labelling and sorting all this new stuff, I kept rediscovering older albums that I hadn’t listened to in a while. Los Campesinos! for example, I’d pretty much skipped over at first after a few precursory spins. Now though, most of this week has been spent with We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed on repeat.
In many ways, Los Campesinos! make me think more of early emo or punk rock bands than their actual influences (Modest Mouse, Broken Social Scene et al); In particular groups like Future of the Left or Say Anything, with their sharp tongues and messy playstyles. Despite most of the songs on We Are Beautiful being about youth, relationships and other twee-pop staples, the lyrics are ofter quite dark and nihilistic.
I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love is to like the other slightly less than you get in return.
I keep feeling like I’m being undercut.
There are a lot of clever lines on this album, and this song is a particular standout. The backing’s great too - a cheery synth line that quickly gets buried under a cluster of guitars, strings and drums, all of which seem less cheery and more demented.
And I couldn’t talk about this song without mentioning one of the all-time great shout-out-loud lines:
Oh we kid ourselves there’s future in the fucking!
But there is no fucking future!
