Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness
I suppose We are Beautiful, We are Doomed and Romance is Boring weren't exactly album cheery titles but this one does clearly signals where they're going on their fourth album in as many years. The playful sex-and-snooker-metaphors single "By Your Hand" is a red herring, although even that centres around a refrain of 'By your hand is the only end I foresee'. This is an album which largely takes the crushing, magnificently emo, career highlight "The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future" as its closest template.
As such it's harder going than any of their albums to date. The music is the most developed and complex of any of their albums, and shows a marked move towards the highest priority being scoring the emotion rather than scoring the punchlines, which is what they have often done so well to date. There are still plenty of big hooks in there, but they're much less emphasised. It takes a bit of adjustment, but makes for another set of great songs.
"Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)" is the song which Gareth has probably been waiting his life to write, a definitive account of the emotional turmoil of both his parents' divorce and supporting England's football team through repeated and inevitable failure. Over cello and barely musical squawks of guitar it turns the symbols of the latter into physical sources of pain - 'These three lions that were sitting on my chest are clawing hard into my skin as I am gasping for my breath... I have to screw up both my eyes as it goes into sudden death' - and is possibly the most darkly funny song they've released, but powerfully moving with it.
"To Tundra" moves from flattened, resigned verses into a giant swell of cathartic emotion even bigger than those of "The Sea...", Gareth's voice straining almost painfully at the edges. "Hate for the Island" sounds too tired and depressed to even manage that. 'It's no lie if the waters rose and drowned that place from coast to coast you wouldn't see the smile leave my face for all eternity' it ends, but there's no real hint of joy in there, just a statement of fact.
I hope that they won't move permanently to this level of darkness, but it's an area which they have explored very rewardingly.
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