Album: Los Campesinos! – Sick Scenes

Released 24th February via Wichita

6/10

It’s incredibly hard to be objective about a Los Campesinos! album. The glorious indie-pop band by their very nature try and worm their way into the minutiae of your life — singer Gareth Paisley’s lyrics are so specific to him they end up inverting themselves and becoming universal. Their last record, No Blues, came out at a pivotal point in my awkward teenage years and became incredibly important to me, practically taking over my entire life.

So, the release of a new album three and a half years later made me more nervous than excited. I’d certainly moved on, but had they? Yes and no is the frustratingly vague answer. They’re certainly more mature, but they’re still ploughing the same furrows, and it hasn’t quite all come together this time.

Lyrically, the album is, as ever, exceptional. This is a desolate album, one no longer defined by relationship catastrophes (the traditional Los Campesinos! staple) but a deeper, older malaise — Gareth’s not heartbroken now, instead his twin muses of depression and death take centre stage, run through a messy filter of lower league football, booze-fuelled bodily destruction and our ongoing decline into a fascist hellscape.

‘A Slow, Slow Death’, one of the album’s few genuinely brilliant songs, is a great example of this. “A schoolboy hero replaced, domestic disgrace, a sad sack, a martyr/We here are common as dirt”, he sings, backed by a brass-soaked, drifting arrangement that’s more reminiscent of the end of The National’s ‘Fake Empire’ than ‘You! Me! Dancing!’.

However, whilst the lyrics are astonishing, the music just doesn’t do it justice. With a few exceptions, like the aforementioned horns, it’s glossy, slick and frankly a bit dull. Too many of the songs go for big emotional choruses without doing anything to earn them, and they seem to be devoid of any real emotion or necessity — it just seems like they made these songs because they’ve forgotten how to do anything else.

This overproduced veneer reaches its nadir on ‘The Fall of Home’, an embarrassing, twee mess that comes across studiously designed to seem earnest, but ends up sounding like it’s been written for a Match.com advert. Even Gareth seems a bit ashamed of it, as he forgets to sing on half of it.

There are exceptions, and some brilliant moments — the constantly rising, Shepard Tone-like tension of standout ‘Got Stendhal’s’; Gareth’s ragged, doomed yelps in ‘I Broke Up in Amarante’, fighting to get up above chaotic guitar squall; the final fuzzed out blast of the otherwise completely forgettable ‘Here’s to the Fourth Time’; the drowning, drunken lurch of ‘For Whom the Belly Tolls’’ breakdown — all of these moments are genuinely thrilling, and remind the listener why this band used to be so vital and life-changing.

Too often, though, the band plays it straight without trying anything new. These songs seem engineered to sound like Los Campesinos!, to be big singalong choruses to scream at gigs, but they miss what made the band great — the desperation, the sense that they need to make this music or their bodies might explode. Gareth’s lyrics remain the best in the business, but they’ve been away too long, and now they’re trying too much to sound like themselves. Ultimately, no matter how much they (and I) want it to be, it’s just not the same.

That said, this album has grown on me a lot since I first listened to it, so it could end up revealing more hidden depths than the plodding arrangements initially seem to have. So far though, it just doesn’t compare to their previous work.