Rising: Los Campesinos!: "Frontwards" (Pavement cover) [Stream] / "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" [Video]
I've got this idea everything's funner in Wales. I'm probably wrong, especially in the winter, but Cardiff seven-piece Los Campesinos! support my theory through noisy, excitable indie pop. Recent singles "You! Me! Dancing!" and "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" matched Art Brut's punk-is-fun smarts with the playground vitality of Architecture in Helsinki. So for their cover of Pavement classic "Frontwards", you kinda figured Los Campesinos! wouldn't try to copy the original's elegiac slow burn.
No worries, it's still a loving rendition. However, the Camps avoid the temptation to become just another band copping moves from the recent indie canon, instead adapting Stephen Malkmus' cryptic melancholy to their own squiggly lo-fi guitars, peppy tempos, glockenspiels, and strings. Aleksandra and Gareth Campesinos! (yes, they call themselves that) enthusiastically switch off lead vocals, with the drums building and cutting out in just the right places. "I've got style, miles and miles/ So much style that it's wasted," they sing, via Malkmus, but neither style nor song are wasted here.
[from the Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP; due 07/03/07 on Arts & Crafts]
Los Campesinos: "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives"