Los Campesinos! Issue #35

Hold On Now, Youngster (Arts & Crafts)

By John Everhart
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 1:45pm

A Welsh act with a marked propensity to fetishize American indie music, Los Campesinos! emerged in 2007 with the excellent Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP. They embraced the brevity of the format nicely with concise, well-written tunes that came on furiously like a sugar rush, with obtuse sensibilities that belied the saccharine pop at their surface. Their debut LP, Hold On Now, Youngster…, thankfully follows the same winning formula of the EP, as it’s a superb collection of frenetic rave-ups interlaced with glockenspiel, violin, and ramshackle guitar melodies, like a toy version of Godspeed You! Black Emperor hopped up on Benzedrine.

Yeah, Los Campesinos! are still up to their eyeballs in hock to Pavement, as evidenced by not only the Sockets EP cover of “Frontwards,” but also “You! Me! Dancing!,” which comes on like “Box Elder” with the BPMs revved to warp speed. But the oddly licentious number, “My Year in Lists,” brazenly forges its own path, engendering awkward emotions that are rendered somehow endearing, as singer-guitarist Gareth bizarrely intones in a Lou Reed–via–Stephen Malkmus speak-sing, “Send me stationary to make me horny, decorating envelopes for foreplay.” “…And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison” is a terrific tune, anthemic and cacophonous like Comet Gain with flippant call-and-response vocals from Gareth and Aleksandra, as they harmonize, “Woe is me / Woe is you / Woe is us together.”

Hold On Now, Youngster… is a tantalizing cipher throughout, exploring the detritus of hidden worlds and common fears, old photographs, K Records T–shirts, B-Sides, dreams of lost lovers and letters. Los Campesinos! doesn’t make any facile attempts at resolution, satisfied instead to fitfully capture the imagination of youth in a blurry, ephemeral rush of melodies, shouts, and handclaps.