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.