Jingle Fever

It's funny to me too because I thought I had moved past the phase of my life where I still fell head over heels for twee-leaning stuff like this. That's underselling both Los Campesinos!— mainly because the guitar tones on this album are murderous and because they don't fuck around with shit like trumpets or toddler keyboards from 1987— and albums by twee bands that I probably still like (Boy Least Likely To, Architecture in Helsinki). For the past few years or so I've viewed twee in my rearview mirror, appreciating those albums more as a gateway away from the indie rock I really lived for in high school and into the further reaches of indie as a proper noun (meaning stuff that Pitchfork will bother to review but doesn't sound like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, i.e. Parts & Labor, Studio, etc.). I guess that's to say I was remembering a band like BLLT more as enablers than artists. I'm not sure if there's really a problem with that (I'm sure there's an assload of "indie" fans who remember the Garden State soundtrack the same way), but either way I was pretty sure I would think new twee would sound nice but ultimately boring. 

It would be wrong to say that LC! make twee that isn't boring, because ultimately they're a long way from I'm From Barcelona. But I think what's drawn me so hard to HONY... is how shrewd and aware of a band they are. They recognize how slippery of a slope it is from playing xylophones and singing "I'll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservation" to being a clown-ass genre-parody like Envelopes, a band that plays more rock-inclined twee like LC! but do it with an a smug sense of slacker self-satisfaction that it's almost sad to listen to (I used to ride for this band a few years ago btw [too lazy to dig up thing I wrote for Stylus about them], but listening to their shit now makes me cringe). 

Also, and I guess in the end, they appeal to the too self-aware cynic in me. They hit this on "We Are All Accelerated Readers": "The opposite of true love is as follows:/Reality!" It's not a groundbreaking sentiment but one that hits me hard nonetheless, because it's cynical, but also because it operates in a realm of reality that a lot of utopian twee— and, shit, a lot of lovesick indie— seems to choose to ignore. They close the song with, "Since we all became accelerated readers/ we never leave the house," which not only nails college-break life right to the wall (which I guess might date it for some people, but really kills me right now), but also shows that LC! are the type of cynics that feel detached from, and in a way above, their peers (maybe this is emo, but I read it as mature insulation). 

I could go on and note a shit ton of cynical and self-aware lyrics ("And woe is me/And woe is you/And woe is us, together" [from, hello, "...And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison"] or "When the smaller picture is the same as the bigger picture/ You know you're fucked") but it shows so viscerally in the way they play and sing: with abandon, like punks. And that's a sly and purposeful self-removal from every scene— twee, American indie, British indie, indie-pop— except indie as a hemisphere-wide umbrella. (They say it themselves: "And it's sad that you think that we're all just scenesters/ And even if we were, it's not the scene you're thinking of.")

To be honest I think this reading (or the band themselves) could be seen as snobby or snotty or elitist, but I see a lot of myself in Los Campesinos!, and if that makes me those things too, I'm okay with that. But I think people are gravitating towards them for those very reasons. It's a quizzical and skeptical eye they cast on the world and their peers, but they also care the most, too.