Los Campesinos — Sick Scenes [on vinyl]
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OH MY GOSH. What could I say about Los Campesinos that I haven’t already said literally every time the social team at VNYL has given me free reign to write about the music I’m digging? A LOT, APPARENTLY!!! My love letter to Sick Scenes is as follows, but first, a little context: Los Campesinos has been my favorite band since 2008, when I accidentally clicked on the music video for ‘My Year In Lists’ while clumsily navigating Comcast On Demand’s video offerings. (If you are ever trying to feel ancient despite being in your mid-twenties, recounting a time before YouTube was popular will definitely do the trick!!!)
I fell in love with LC in the way that 17 year olds do — 100% invested and low-key totally obsessed. Their debut album was cacophonous and busy and occasionally kinda mildly abrasive (if I’m being honest!!!) and 10 years later, it is still unlike any other record I’ve ever heard (and also my favorite album of all time AND my favorite vinyl record in my whole collection).
The point here: I have loved Los Campesinos for A VERY LONG TIME. I could write small novels about each record (someone, please pay me to do this, I have a lot of #thoughts and #feelings about literally every track ever released) but let’s jump to Sick Scenes which is what I was supposed to be writing about the entire time!!!
In their review of LC’s latest album — and in an attempt to understand why the band has had such longevity, despite a lot of fans really clinging to their debut album from 2008 — Pitchfork remarked that Los Campesinos was “too sugary for the emo diehards, too tart for the indie bandwagoners, too emo for the cool kids.”
As someone who has also existed in this sort of weird, nebulous space as a person (too ~normie~ and into classic pop sensibilities for the emo kids, too ~sad~ and into weird shit for the cool kids), I am prone to think that this is why Los Camp has resonated with me for so long. If you are also someone who describes themselves as living in this ambiguous middle ground, I think you will also fuck with my top 5 favorite tracks from Sick Scenes:
Renato Dall’Ara (2008): There’s a classic joke in the music industry that all artists will play a venue once on the way up and once on the way back down. That said, the chorus for this track includes this gem: “Living off 2008…once up then back down again.” HOW SELF AWARE IS THIS, GUYS? Wow. (On a personal tip, this is the song on my Tinder profile, so you know I ACTUALLY love it.)
A Slow, Slow Death: Sometimes you jump into an LC record expecting bright gang vocals about depression or soccer or vomit or ex-girlfriends. NAH. If you need a track with nuanced commentary about Brexit, this is it. It’s nice when the band you loved at 17 has grown up alongside ya, you know?
The Fall of Home: This is the perfect track for when you’re from a state with under a million people and everyone always kinda stays there but you graduate high school and decide to go to college 300 miles away and then after college you decide that’s not far enough so you move 3,000 miles away instead and then you fly back home once a year for a week for Christmas but all of your friends are married now and some of them have kids and everything is just kinda different and you’re like…what the fuck is happening here? (Or something like that, definitely not like this happened to me or anything.)
5 Flucloxacillin: “Another blister pack pops but I still feel much the same / 31 and depression is a young man’s game.” There’s this interview with The 405 where Gareth, the songwriter/vocalist of LC has this to say — and it is better than anything I could write, so take this as you will — “I think that for me that’s probably the one lyric that most sums up the record…I think when I was younger and depressed I’d always comfort myself by saying things like ‘it’ll get better, you won’t feel like it anymore’ and when you’re younger it seems like you’re allowed to be depressed and uncertain and going through things. But now dealing with it in your early 30s it’s like, ‘Why? Why am I still like this? Why hasn’t it fixed itself?’” FEEL THAT. Holla @ me if you are also sad!
Got Stendhal’s: This track just has one of my favorite chorus melodies of all time. Not gonna do another ~lyric deep dive~ but DANG THAT CHORUS MELODY!
I have been the record buyer at VNYL for a little over 3 years and Sick Scenes has been my all-time favorite purchase for our members (I may or may not have asked my team take a picture of me and the boxes when they arrived!!!). I CANNOT WAIT for some of you to fall in love with this record — and then hopefully, all of the records — in the same way that I have! Please @ me with all your thoughts and opinions or if you wanna chat about LC or if you wanna fly me to London for my birthday, which happens to be the same weekend Los Campesinos is playing the O2.
Love (and thanks to my social and curation team for their never-ending patience as they’ve waited for over a week for me to turn this in, woops),
Caitlin
