“You! Me! Dancing! (EP Version)” – Los Campesinos!
(Words/music: Tom Campesinos! and Gareth Campesinos!, available on Sticking Fingers into Sockets EP, Arts & Crafts 2007)

I understand why I like Los Campesinos! – they play frenetic pop music that seems ready to explode at any minute.  Their songs burst from the seams with violins, glockenspiel, rapid fire streams of words, and melody from all angles.  No, if you described a band like this to me, I’d ask to borrow the album, no questions.  I’m more curious why this band has taken such a hold on me.  From the first time that I listened to the Sticking Fingers into Sockets EP a couple years ago (when I listened to all sixteen minutes of it three times in a row – an act unheard of in my post-iPod era of song shuffling) through the moment that I received the We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed LP in the mail today after a prolonged backorder, I’ve been so smitten with the Welsh youngsters.

The easy way out of this would be to say that their youthful exuberance brings me back to my own days as a teenager, and that’s certainly true.  Their volumnuous, Live Journal like lyrics are sweet, snarky, and so full of charm and life that it harkens back to those teenage days when everything burned a little brighter – the highs seemed higher and the lows seemed cavernous.  I’m not sure that the youthful energy alone answers my question, though; otherwise, I’d still have an affinity for anything that was on the radio in 1996 just because it reminded me of being a teenager again.  No, there’s something that makes the twentysomething Brian melt with each note.

One of my favorite college professors loved to share his favorite (and almost always esoteric) words, sometimes to the point where my roommate and I would place bets on how many times he would put a word on the chalkboard and tell us to remember it.  One of his favorite words, and one that’s stuck with me since, is “palimpsest” – a painting that’s been painted over an older painting.  As the newer work wears, the “original” painting shines through, creating a new piece of art as a hybrid of the two.  To a degree, I think that our personalities are palimpsests – we change over time, but our previous paintings always manage to shine through.  As we grow older and add new details about ourselves, certain details from the past manage to shine through – we’re not the same, we’re not different, but we’re something new and old simultaneously.

So thinking about myself this way, I see the different layers of my taste reflected in “You! Me! Dancing!”  The slow build up into a distinctive riff that sets the song off on its way reminds me of Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot,” only this sounds like “Teen Age Riot” played by actual teenagers – it’s a bit sloppy, a bit bubblier, and not nearly as restrained as Thurston and company.  Still, for all its nervous energy, it’s a well made composition – the backing harmonies, shifts from verse to chorus, and different texture changes (the legato violin lines in half time set up the snappy, full speed chorus) – show a band with a gift for arrangements and enthusiasm at the same time.  It’s equal parts wise beyond its years and young for its age – a perfect way of presenting a song about those joyous nights with friends that always seem to end too soon.  Gareth Campesinos! paraphrases Rousseau at the end when he declares that we’re “ignorant, we’re stupid, but we’re happy.”  Even if we grow out of this youthful naïveté, it’s still in there, waiting to peek through our current portrait and bring us back to that state of mind.

More on Los Campesinos!: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm