A Small Catalog Of Reflections On Aging Made Possible By Los Campesinos!
CHICAGO — Two fists clasp tight together, imperiled on all sides by sharp shards pointing directly at this simple, affirming gesture of human solidarity. It’s an image that still lingers in my mind more than a month after seeing Los Campesinos! perform for the first time in my life at Thalia Hall. When it feels like everything is going to shit, and you really can’t imagine a time when we might let our guard down a little, there’s still a comfort in such a perilous bond. It’s a reminder that you must hold to be held, must continue to show up with anyone who is ready to show up for you in turn, and that we build on these intimate bonds to fight for a better world—especially for those who we will never meet, yet cherish all the same.
The image, and the band’s return in this moment, feel providential. Seven years after Sick Scenes, the time for fresh LC! material seemed nigh, and it’s hard to not feel the intervening years bearing down upon the band’s demeanor. All Hell, their seventh album, is a stubborn reminder to choose optimism, or at least joyous pessimism, when those in charge would attempt to stretch our solidarity past its limits. Watching the group perform to a packed room that seemingly comprised an equal mix of dyed-in-the-wool fans like my friends Mary and Carlos, screaming to every word, and much younger newcomers, enamored with the group’s arch sincerity, I felt my own fandom come full circle. The band has soundtracked years of change in my life, and my chance to finally share the experience of witnessing them perform live could not have come at a better time.
To honor the band’s own intense (self-)referentiality, and to acknowledge the brilliant lyricism of lead singer Gareth David Paisey, the following are lyrics from songs Los Campesinos! played that night and lines from their new album. Just as the band cannot help but crosscheck countless other sources of inspiration, I found myself constantly pondering other thrills, pleasures and pains while turning these words over in my mind.
“If there’s one thing I could never confess / It’s that I can’t dance a single step” (“You! Me! Dancing!”)
It’s the Los Camp! song that started it all for me, and for obvious reason: As a teen who never went to a single school dance, Gareth’s clumsy inability to even imagine mustering a single effective move held painful resonance. It wasn’t for lack of trying. My first prom rejection came via letter and mixtape, from a girl who lived a four-hour drive away. The next year, I underlined “Will you go to prom with me?” in a copy of Anna Karenina, given to a Russian lit nerd who already had other plans. To dance is now a fundamental quality of my life, and to share this song with my partner Elise, its sheer infectiousness enough to convince them to come to the show, gives us an excuse to leave it all behind on the dancefloor, where another line comes to mind: “And dispatches from the back of my mind/Says so long as we’re here everything is alright.”
“A body drained of all feeling / Could be nothing but a piece of meat” (“Allez Les Blues”)
“We’ll live and breathe it in real time, montage is for the dead” (“For Flotsam”)
I’d had chances to see LC! before this year, almost all of which came pre-transition. In a body where I was not guaranteed goosebumps at the opening notes of a beloved song played live—the kind of internal connection that happens unquestioningly today—I felt myself especially detached at shows, undone particularly by other people’s cell phones separating my body from the band on stage. For so long, I took other people’s filming personally, my mind boggled when I witnessed people cut themselves off from their surroundings so willingly—like the man at Animal Collective who took a Snapchat to the song “Bees,” then couldn’t decide how many e’s to affix to the caption, which occupied him for the remainder of the song. As I’ve grown more embodied through transition, I’ve softened my stance on concert filming a bit, more content to simply step to the side, to live and let live. I’m grateful to no longer feel so vacant while at concerts, savoring that rare space where you and the words you’ve shouted alone in your room for years are now in the throats of countless others, the band a mere conduit for this shared sensation.
“And you must confess that at times like these / Hopefulness is tantamount to hopelessness” (“My Year in Lists”)
This nugget, number four in the titular list of New Year’s resolutions that Gareth refuses to write down, reads much like a line from Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” The Camus quote, an observation on the irony of people dying for their beliefs in god or politics, came into my life in an Existentialism class that mostly flew over my head as a freshman. In the years to come, it would become a critical frame of reference. I found these themes in the music of LCD Soundsystem as well, connections made while seeing them play a few months post-graduation, reeling in my unresolved state of 22-year-old ennui. James Murphy’s deadpan observation that “Life is finite, but shit it feels like forever” put Camus’s outlook to a beat. Learning to live with these paradoxes, to find the silly beauty in accepting that not every circle will be squared, was a fundamental challenge that I began to inhabit with greater joy in my early twenties, content to sometimes let things remain perfectly incomprehensible, and to keep on dancing anyways.
“Do you still have that one tattoo / That’s how it works, of course you do” (“A Psychic Wound”)
We live in impermanent, fickle vessels. I look at photos from last year, before face surgery, or from five years ago, in my “lady with a mustache” era, and it seems impossible to imagine my body (or anyone’s) ever serving as a reliable archive. Upon hearing this fabulous Gareth lyric on the new record, I find myself cataloging my body’s twenty-odd tattoos, trying to remember their chronology, grateful that these silly drawings that now cover plenty of skin will always help others keep track of me. My first tattoo was an outline of Colorado that strangers reliably confuse for their own rectangular Western home state. My leg hosts an ever-expanding convention of rat tattoos, honoring my great devotion to these creatures. In each, I feel my body faithfully marked across time. After hearing ML Buch sing “Here we go / With our temporary bodies” at Pitchfork Music Festival this weekend, I picture myself sincerely scratching these words into my forearm, the ultimate reminder that even a ‘permanent’ tattoo is nothing once the body is gone, returned to the nothingness from where it began.
“I’ll stay home and keep the garden alive” (“A Psychic Wound”)
Just before going to the show, my friends Mandy and Erik, worker-owners of the radical bookstore Pilsen Community Books, take us on a tour of their backyard, where their landlord has just built a scarcely used parking space that destroyed their wildflower garden (after their strawberries were already killed from the neighbor’s weed killer). I picture my friends, years into the future, doing much of the same things we’re doing now: going to shows, reading, getting into fervent political debates, and tending to these small spaces we call home. To know that Mandy and Erik immediately set about replanting where they could, after months of gardening work was destroyed in an instant, reminds me that our best efforts require constant attention, and that sometimes, you “try your best but feel the worst,” as Gareth sings on “I Broke Up in Amarante.”
“I’m not sure if it’s love anymore / But I’ve been thinking of you fondly for sure / Remember what your heart is for” (“By Your Hand”)
Am I not supposed to tell people that I’ve just met that I love them? In this silly world of ours, love is “a small word / unable to hold / while we stretch at its meaning,” as Phil Elvrum sings on “Love Without Possession.” It’s a thing we are supposed to parcel out in careful quantities, lest we dilute its meaning. Yet in the small-numbered hours after meeting strangers that become fast friends at Pitchfork, I ask myself, Why should I not tell these people? (To my new friend whose name is literally Charles Barkley, with whom I discussed meditation for too long as Brittany Howard shredded on stage, this is for you.) What is a heart for, if not to find moments in which it can reach across the chasm of human loneliness to remind others that they are seen and cherished? Propriety still holds me back at times, but the band knows—there is love in everything and everyone, and we must remind each other of that daily.
“You can buy your hopes and dreams now, at the affiliate link / Selling back the solidarity they got given as a gift” (“A Psychic Wound”)
“Moral panic breeds goose-stepping, can’t just stand by rubbernecking” (“To Hell in a Handjob”)
In an excellent feature on the new record in The Line Of Best Fit, Gareth speaks to a recognizable anxiety when he says, “Who cares what I think or what I have to say? I was hyper-aware that I am a white cisgender straight male, who we hear far too much from, and it’s like, how can I say anything that is worthwhile?” I remember that straight white male dread well: the fear that, however well-intentioned one might be, you’re better off keeping quiet, lest you take up more space than you already have.
And yet: Los Campesinos! is back, not out of desperate financial necessity, but because this project has created something far bigger than themselves—a feeling they need to tap into as much as their fans do. While we watch companies like Amazon and Spotify brag about their social largesse while destroying people’s livelihoods, you feel the difference when you’re actually in a room side-by-side with some of your closest friends, and with a band you’ve loved half of your life, whose onstage gestures towards Palestinian and trans solidarity are the most natural thing. I don’t think these thoughts were on my mind when I first heard the group’s earliest songs as a teen, but seeing them live, I’m reminded of how their overabundant emotionality was a lifeline in more muted times, how the urge to show up for others has been a saving grace when very little else made me feel alive.
Now, when I watch the music video for “A Psychic Wound,” drawn from live footage of the band’s set at the Troxy in February, I see the two clasped fists with fresh eyes. What once looked like terrible danger feels more like lines of emphasis, there to celebrate human solidarity as the greatest achievement we’ll ever know. The band is clearly doing this from a place of overwhelming love for one another and the audience they’ve developed. Every new fan, every person willing to channel these same beliefs, can build upon these things in their own lives, delighting in the magic of something far bigger than oneself.
