After a couple of years of releasing singles that established their place as the most exciting new thing happening in music, 2008 was finally the year for Los Campesinos!. They could get away without even including two of them on their album, such was the confidence in what they did go ahead with (and perhaps concious that "The International Tweexcore Underground" was too perfect a mission statement for their marriage of twee and punk to slot in).
Not so much inviting devotion as demanding it, this is a band by music obsessives for music obsessives. Rooted in a really specific outsider world of mixes and lists and poring over lyrics (and one where 'four sweaty boys with guitars tell my nothing about my life'), they are convinced of its importance, giving mere love and pain only equal importance. They're also filled with a neurotic lyrical self-awareness that helps to make them the most endlessly funny and quotable band in a long time.
So references to Camera Obscura, Bis, indie festivals, Livejournal, second hand bookshop employees, Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia and so on and on, and lines like 'Conversations about which Breakfast Club character you'd be/I'd be the one who dies (no one dies!)/Well then what's the point?' and 'You said send me stationery to make me horny/So I always write you letters in multicolours/Decorating envelopes for foreplay' to pick two examples of many at random. The sort of thing that makes you go around playing songs to people and saying 'Listen to this bit!' even when you thought you'd stopped doing that by now.
Bands that just get it in the same way are rare as anything (only Art Brut come to mind) but what really makes Los Campesinos! something else is that they go beyond and (successfully) strain at every step to create music to excite people in the same way, with not a hint of the same self-conciousness. Their default setting of gleeful sugar-rush, throwing everything at hand (and some extra glockenspiels) at the song and sticking most of it, is amazingly successful even before you add in the quickfire call and response and moments of expansive genuis like the warm post-rock embrace that offers a quick breather before the hedonistic rush of single of the decade "You! Me! Dancing!" kicks in good and proper.
Sounding completely fully formed and with no end of songs all worth obsessing over and listening to again and again, it's exactly the sort of debut that would take quite something to follow up.
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