LOS CAMPESINOS-“Hold On Now, Youngster”

Los Campesinos already have a rabid fanbase, even if this album is their debut, but this is the first album of theirs I’ve had the fortune to hear, and it reminds me a lot of The Go! Team. Only better, because it doesn’t suffer from muddy production and because it doesn’t lack song structure. At least not entirely.

“Hold On Now, Youngster,” has lots of shouting, hyperactive beats, beeps, jumps, and every guitar plays riffs. Nothing but riffs. It’s like eating Fun Dip through Pixie Stix, and washing it down with Pop Rocks and Pepsi. Some songs have verses and choruses, although most just seem to be speed freak rants that, in the case of “Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats,” suddenly slow down into a string-section lament.

There’s seven folks making sounds on this album, and all of them attempt to coordinate together and form a synthetic whole. There’s even pop Glockenspiel. Sometimes it works (“Death to Los Campesinos!”; “We Throw Parties You Throw Knives”) and sometimes it doesn’t (“Drop it Doe Eyes”), but it works often enough to make the album a lot of childish fun. If you have to ask what the songs mean, you obviously haven’t listened to them. What kind of depth do you expect from a song titled, “You! Me! Dancing!” anyway? I expect unabashed booty shaking, and that’s what I get. Sexless dance music for any age, complex dance music for the hipster crowd, without a trace of crunk or crudity.

Naïve and innocent, stupid and unsophisticated, hysterical (in the lack-of-sanity sense) and raving, pure and delightful.

For fans of : Art Brut, Len, The Go! Team. Available on e-music and wherever music for mental patients is sold.

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