Saturday 02.11.12: LOS CAMPESINOS! with PARENTHETICAL GIRLS @ Echoplex

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8:30pm / $16.00 adv; $20 dos; $21 Walk Up Day Of Show / 18+

Los Campesinos! || LISTEN|| Watch
‘Hello Sadness’ is the fourth record by Los Campesinos!, and if 2009’s ‘Romance Is Boring’ marked a giant step on from their genesis – seven kids and a glockenspiel, ricocheting off the four walls of a Cardiff rehearsal room – ‘Hello Sadness’ constitutes another step, and a turn of the corner. Yes, these 10 tracks cover what we are coming to recognise as core Los Campesinos! concerns – love, loss, heartbreak, football (always football). But this is a record that’s wiser and more focused than its predecessors, confident in its abilities and clear in its aims. On first listen, ‘Hello Sadness’ might sound like a less fraught album than its predecessors. Gone is the hypertense, panic-attack rattle that characterised ‘We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed’, and the melancholy wallow that you heard in corners of ‘Romance Is Boring’ is in short supply. Play it more, though, and you hear an emotion that comes from somewhere softer, deeper, and – dare we say it – more authentic. Two weeks before recording, Gareth Campesinos! split up with his girlfriend, and, he says, “everything written before then became void.” While written at pace, ‘Hello Sadness’ finds Gareth’s lyrics reaching new levels of poetic articulacy. A strange menagerie of creatures – blackbirds, horses, woodworm – stalk and crawl the verses, and the landscape of the human form remains a preoccupation. On the title track, he charts the lines of a lover’s body – “The space between your navel/And your waist band was the ice/Where two fingers pirouette” – but any tenderness is unwanted, unrequited. On ‘Life Is A Long Time’, meanwhile, a catalogue of arguments manifest physically, in creases and wrinkles. “Aging is definitely in mind,” says Gareth. “I think a lot of people still think of us in this kind of youthful sense, but we’re in this weird place in our mid-twenties where you start to think like a grown-up. I feel more 30 than 20, but you’re not really allowed to – everyone wants to tell you how you’re still so young. The record in general is about this weird state of limbo – being in a band is an incredible privilege, but it can make it hard to find your place in the world.” All this, though, in a clutch of songs that are more accessible and more direct than anything that’s come before. Current musical preoccupations include such reliably lo-fi names as Bruce Springsteen, R&B smoothie The-Dream, and Paul Heaton of The Housemartins and The Beautiful South, who, says Gareth, “really inspired me to try to sing more, rather than shout or yelp, to really work on melodies.”

Parenthetical Girls || LISTEN|| Watch
Ever the pragmatists, Parenthetical Girls are in the midst of releasing Privilege–the band’s new full length–as a box set of five extremely limited 12″ EPs on their own Slender Means Society label. These EPs will be sold separately in sequence every quarter over the next 15 months, each as they are completed. They will not be distributed to stores. As the cycle concludes, the fifth and final 12″ will come packaged in a beautiful, aesthetically cohesive LP box designed to house all four of the preceding releases, forming the complete Privilege album. Limited to 500 physical copies per EP, the 12″s will each feature original art by renowned Swedish illustrator Jenny Mörtsell, and will be hand-numbered in the blood of their respective band members. The fourth 12″–subtitled Sympathy For Spastics–will be released on November 1, 2011, and will be
numbered in the blood of cover star/Parenthetical Girl Amber Smith.

Having taken pop extravagance to its logical conclusion with their critically acclaimed Orchestral Pop opus Entanglements, Parenthetical Girls have given the orchestra their leave–and the resulting transformation is no less momentous. Returning to its core membership of vocalist/creative director Zac Pennington and producer/arranger Jherek Bischoff, the group set about a path that they have heretofore never really charted: that of sonic restraint. And though the results could scarcely be called subtle, the language of Privilege is direct and unambiguous–a new creative candor that’s felt in both its words and music. It’s Parenthetical Girls in fighting trim, and the difference is both immediate and undeniable.

The group continues this ambitious experiment with Privilege, pt IV: Sympathy For Spastics–a bizarre and bombastic four-song suite of familial entrapments, the sexual politics of class warfare, and blissful resignation. The EP opens upon “The Privilege,” a meditative exploration of family discord and terminal nostalgia. “A Note To Self” follows, an uncharacteristically upbeat pop pastiche about coming to terms with critical failure, personal resentments, and creative responsibility. “Entitlements” is a spiteful attack on the indulgences of privileged self-pity (with wincingly direct allusions to a particular patron saint of privileged malaise), while “Sympathy For Spastics” explores the often bleakly patronizing intersection of class and sexual politics. Together, they comprise a bold, strikingly cohesive pop clarion call that further solidifies Parenthetical Girls’ place amongst the most surprising and uncompromising pop groups at work today. And there’s more where that came from.Force Field