Usually age is a liability for rock bands, but on Los Campesinos! recently released seventh album, All Hell, “the U.K.’s first and only emo band” unequivocally proves that their well-earned longevity is an asset.
The band describes All Hell as an album on “drinking for fun and drinking for misery // adult acne // adult friendship // football // death and dying // love and sex // late-stage capitalism // Orpheus // day dreaming // night terrors // the heart as an organ and as a burden // suburban boredom // Tears of the Kingdom // the punks on the playlist // increments of time // climate apocalypse // the moon the moon the moon ///.” It’s also a distillation of everything that has made any era of the long-running band great — an outpouring that places an exclamation point at the end of a seven-year sentence without a new Los Campesinos! Album.
So exactly how much history is being channeled into All Hell? Enough for a gratuitous but hardly exhaustive rundown of the band’s past.
The cultishly beloved band formed in Cardiff, Wales, in the mid-aughts, and came to online indie prominence in an era when lyrics referencing LiveJournal were completely comprehensible and a strong MySpace presence could galvanize a fanbase and help a band get signed. Across the better part of two decades, they’ve released seven proper albums without a clunker in the bunch, an emotional live album, a pretty good Christmas album, oodles of EPs (including a knockout acoustic release of Romance is Boring tracks) and a spate of zines. They also started their own record label and predicted at least one bizarre political scandal. They built a peculiar mythos with a lore that includes veganism, European football allegiances, doomed relationships, heart swells, documented minor emotional breakdowns, wounds shaped like flyover country, skin problems and Best New Music near-misses.
That run includes some considerable changes to the band’s sound, lineup and the rate at which LC! Releases albums. Perhaps the most prominent shakeup was the loss of Aleksandra Berditchevskaia, whose vocals were an integral part of early LC! releases, and the addition of Kim Paisey, who has been an equally important presence on middle- and late-period Los Campesinos! albums. While Los Camp’s members had long adopted “Los Campesinos!” as stage surnames, Kim, who is the sister of lead singer and lyricist Gareth David, made it a literal family affair. The switch, which happened following 2010’s Romance is Boring, did not mark the first nor last sonic shift for the band. After their attention-grabbing debut, LC! quickly moved away from the twee-punk sugar rush of their early releases, embracing crunchy synth textures and noisier influences on their second and third albums. With Paisey in tow, Los Campesinos! then shifted toward a more restrained pop-tinged indie rock sound, pitching a big tent for sad bastards of all stripes. Whether you prefer acerbic lyrics and sometimes-bleak shout-alongs delivered with a side of burbling synth or straightforward guitar leads, if the low is what you came for, you can find community, commiseration, and catharsis in latter-day Los Campesinos! Los Camps’ sound is further polished on All Hell thanks to relatively slick production, a full-but-not-overwhelming sound, ample hooks, and the smoothest vocals of David’s career, All Hell is the most-approachable LC! album yet — give or take 2011’s Hello Sadness.
That doesn’t mean that the band sanded down the edges, edited out the verbosity or resolved the obsessions that have long been part of the Los Campesinos! experience All Hell is an album that opens with the words “Hypnic jerk” and features a song titled “Hell in a Handjob,” after all. But it does mean that band member Tom Bromely’s production work and the engineers the band worked with deserve serious kudos. All Hell is an album that features violin, cello, and saxophone in addition to the usual seven suspects — David (vocals,), Paisey (vocals, keys), Bromley (lead guitar), Jason Adelinia (drums), Matt Fidler (bass), Neil Turner (guitar) and Rob Taylor (keys/percussion) — without sounding cluttered. Whether a song is a soft-spoken strummer like album-closer “Adult Acne Stigmata” or a fiery lamentation from a smitten scenester like “Holy Smoke (2005)” the music is both crisp and affecting. Even the studio clatter that preempts many tracks seems thoughtful.
The level of craft, accessibility and the overall quality of the tunes are what renders familiarity with the long arc of the Los Campesinos! discography unnecessary for enjoying All Hell. You can exalt in the dreary triumph of album-opener “The Coin-Op Guillotine” without hearing history in every glockenspiel strike, contemplate a “Feast of Tongues” without also wondering whether that’s something Gareth can even eat, hum along to “kms” unaware that a Kim-fronted track is nearly unprecedented in the LC! oeuvre and admire the sparseness of “I.Spit; or, a Bite Mark in the Shape of the Sunflower State” sans knowledge that Missouri- and Oklahoma-shaped blemishes factored into the band’s third album. But, the listening experience is inarguably richer for people who will hear the callbacks and clock the myriad references scattered throughout All Hell. Anyone can rock out to the delightfully wordy “Clown Blood; or, Orpheus’ bobbing Head,” but a core contingent of “weeping dipshits” will also geek out at mid-song group-shout that recalls a fan-favorite track. The thoughtfulness and deftness with which these moments are deployed make them less moments of fanservice than individual lines in an album-length love letter and thank-you note to longtime fans. If you don’t pick up on that, you’re left with just one of the year’s best albums loaded with gobsmacking lyrical flourishes.
On that note. All Hell, like virtually everything Los Campesinos! have ever released, is a showcase of lyrical virtuosity. Dense wordplay, references that pull deep from mythology and sports, bleak comedy and an intense focus on physicality have long been hallmarks of a Gareth David-penned tune. They’re a frequent presence deployed with great effect on All Hell, too. A few dazzling examples — a near spoonerism that rhymes parasocial puppet master with sacrificial Muppet pastor on “Clown Blood;” the chorus for “0898 HEARTACHE” “Grind my bones into the finest snow/ Lay me and melt me in a crack of sun/ Restored to earth, afforded a second birth/ Dine on my rotten fruit for years to come;” and the second verse “Holy Smoke” “Don’t get me wrong I love my friends’ kids, sure they’ll grow to be good leftists/ Bet they’ll make their parents proud and make the best of what they’re left with/ But they don’t buy the beers I drink, and they don’t drink the beers I buy/ No children and no profession, walking dead at 37.” Somehow these lines are delivered in a way that’s catchy, affirming and begs to be bleated toward the rafters of whatever room you’re in. They’re memorable when read off a lyrics sheet, but really bounce around your skull when set to music.
That same level of specificity and craft reverberates in every element of All Hell’s release, especially its preposterously pretty physical forms. The album’s painting, design, and layout are all credited to band member Taylor, and his artwork provides an aesthetic throughline for the music videos and merch that have rolled out with All Hell. Los Campesinos! have always leaned into a DIY ethos and favored boutique, visually interesting merch, but they’ve absolutely outdone themselves. The Harvest Moon edition of the album in particular is so gorgeous as to be almost useless as a record. While it does sound great spinning at 45 revolutions per minute, a certain type of music lover will have a hard time watching a needle drag across a black bloom enveloping a blood-red moon in the middle of a bed of crimson. Thankfully, the pre-order deluxe package also included a black vinyl pressing to go along with a CD, cassette tape, pin, pennant and signed photo of the band.
If all of that sounds like an embarrassment of riches that completely satisfies any reasonable expectation, well, it is and it does. But it’s also hard not to take in All Hell and its related paraphernalia and immediately want more. For all its call backs, All Hell sounds less like a retrospective than a way forward for a mature band drawing from a well of creativity with plenty left in the reservoir. It’s understandable that following up a 15-song LP that sounds like the culmination — if not the apex — of a nearly 20-year career might take time. But if it’s another seven years, well, that’d be a hell we know too well.