ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!
Every musician is also an audience, and if the ever-growing pile of new music my exhausted mailman brings me every day is any indication, more and more audience members are becoming musicians, too. Since long before "indie" was a buzzword, the loosely defined scene has celebrated participatory self-expression-- whether in the first independently released punk records ("It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it," sang the Desperate Bicycles in 1977, on one of the first ever), the hand-assembled 7" singles of 1980s indie pop, the four-track cassettes of 1990s lo-fi, or even the revival-meeting catharsis of the Arcade Fire and "Form a Band" exhortations of Art Brut. Nobody writes them like they used to, so it may as well be you.
(WITH MY WALKMAN TUCKED UNDER MY FOREARM)
Few bands have made as much out of this ideal of enthusiast-as-artist as Los Campesinos!. Formed two years ago at Cardiff University in Wales, the indie-pop septet first grabbed attention on MySpace, but their music embodies some the best elements of the past 30 years of indie music. It's not just the superficial connections, like their Ramones- or Pastels-style surnames, band-made zine, or the cover of Pavement B-side "Frontwards" on last year's slept-on Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP. With boy/girl exclamations (!) befitting a punkier Heavenly/Calvin Johnson collaboration (!!), the lavish instrumentation of Broken Social Scene (whose Dave Newfeld produces), childish glockenspiels, and exuberantly buzzing guitars, debut album Hold on Now, Youngster... is a giddy, tuneful love note to individuality, pathos, smarts, silliness, and everything else indie pop built its name on. There's even the requisite ironic self-mockery-- nobody actually thought this stuff was cool, did they?
FOUR SWEATY BOYS WITH GUITARS TELL ME NOTHING ABOUT MY LIFE!
Like indie bands from the Smiths to Vampire Weekend, Los Campesinos! pack their songs with lyrical specificity, only their lives are apparently full of internet surfing, indie fandom, and absurd humor. "Stick with the imprints/ With the hieroglyphics that the fan club sent us," Gareth Campesinos! hollers with every exclamation point in his young being on "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats", which claps into an Aleksandra Campesinos!-sung chorus about Spiderman. This bunch are as apt to sing about CTRL-ALT-DEL, LiveJournal entries, and that old blogger standby "throwing up in my mouth" as they are about B-sides, K Records T-shirts, or C-90 cassettes. Hey, this is what they know, and they document it with an emotional vividness that should have Pete Wentz friending them in no time. (Even though he probably won't get most of their jokes.)