Los Campesinos!- Hold on Now, Youngster

Los Campesinos! is comprised of former students of Whales’ Cardiff University. However, after a short time spent listening to their first album, Hold On Now, Youngster, one might assume they recently finished the eighth grade. The album is built on energetic pop/rock that is so shamelessly “poppy” one may have a hard time calling it rock. The only difference between Los Campesinos! and your average U.K. pop/rock is that other bands generally don’t sing boy/girl duets about everything from Spiderman to puking in shoe boxes.

Although the melodies are catchy and the guitars keep the energy up with peppy and pushing staccato, the overall feel of the album is that you’re listening in on the conversation of middle school students during their lunch break. The worst part is you don’t even feel like you’re at the cool kid’s table. Los Campesinos! is what the kids everyone avoided in school would have sounded like if they had some basic musical ability, a glockenspiel, an older brother to buy them cigarettes, and a steady supply of alcohol from their parents liquor cabinet.

Lyrically the album centers around relationships that sound like they started with the passing of a love note during third period. An entire song is devoted to their desire to read Jane Eyre, and this is not even the only song on the album that’s been dedicated to literature. In “We are all Accelerated Readers” the band plainly states, “Since we became accelerated readers we never leave the house.” Eventually they’ll have to cut back on their reading and muse on something other than their English class adventures.

The Good Life-Album of the Year

Tim Kasher is self admittedly a drunken romantic, and that’s what drives his side project, The Good Life’s, Album of the Year. Kasher and friends have created an album that is essentially a collection of stories that revolve around the search for love, the inevitability of lust, the pain of loss, and the mixture of alcohol with all of the above.

Kasher, also a member of the influential Omaha band Cursive, shies away from the heavier sound of Cursive toward more acoustically driven songs. Although the Curisve sound leaks through on one or two tracks Cursive fans may not recognize Kasher in this form. Album of the Year brings out a softer side of Kasher that generally goes unheard in Cursive albums. The album, as a whole, feels very personal and private especially on tracks like “Lovers Need Lawyers” where Kasher states plainly, “I swear to speak the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, o so help me god I wasn’t cheating on you.”

Other tracks provide what seem like similar honesty but describe in detail Kasher’s escapades with women who are assumedly not his girlfriend. However, in tracks like “Inmates” and the album’s title track Kasher describes entire relationships from start to finish without mention of his extracurricular activity. From his first encounter with a long time girlfriend he sings, “The first time that I met her I was throwing up in a ladie’s room stall,” to his final meeting with her, “The last time that I saw her she was picking through which records were hers.” He does with such honestly and so realistically that it becomes easy to understand his pain and relate to it on some level. However, if you find yourself relating to this album too much you may want to consider drinking less.