Following Los Campesinos! since their breakthrough in the early days of the blog rock era has been a fun and quite unique ride. They’ve moved from hyped-up critical darlings to underappreciated cult heroes to elder statespeople and touchstones of a burgeoning UK emo scene. What started as a group of students messing around with glockenspiel and writing angst-written bursts of twee energy has become a wholesome and wholly professional outfit, maintaining creative control over every aspect of their work.
What’s been interesting is that, while they give absolutely everything to Los Campesinos!, Los Campesinos! is not absolutely everything in their lives. They each live a “normal” day-to-day existence with day jobs and families, which has allowed the band to become their outlet, rather than their lifeline. The downside of this, for fans, is that the space between their albums has become greater, with the possibility that they might not release another record becoming greater with each passing year.
All Hell, their seventh album, arrives more than seven years after their last – and it feels like a bit of a miracle. Not only that it exists, but that Los Campesinos! sound this sharp, punchy and dialled-in, delivering their most ambitious and longest album since 2010’s opus Romance Is Boring – and doing so while maintaining all the hallmarks that have made them such a beloved force. While they might not have released an album for a long time, Los Campesinos! have been playing live frequently, and these experiences seem to have helped musical mastermind Tom Bromley to fine-tune the songs here to become dynamic, guitar-driven thrill rides.
This pairs perfectly with the emotional battlefield that singer and iconic lyricist Gareth David traverses across the album. Where previous album Sick Scenes reflected his feelings as he and his bandmates entered their 30s, All Hell arrives as they’re staring down the end of their fourth decade. On first impression, it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to Gareth’s attitude and maturity; his heightened, unlucky-in-lust ego-driven persona is still intact and delivering blistering barbs that are as much aimed at himself as anyone else.
This mixes potently with his other vice; alcohol. “Holy Smoke (2005)” finds him drunk in a club, obsessively, hopelessly lusting; “hearing your name in the chorus left me prostrate in the pit”. Later, “The Order of the Seasons” has him first admitting “I turn to the booze and my thoughts turn to you” then “my thoughts turn to you so I turn to the booze”, an unhealthy negative cycle that is mirrored in the song structure’s continual build to one Los Campesinos! ready-made scream-along finales.
The spectacular guitar slasher “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Laughing Head” has him reminiscing about an ex in a “Lanzarote lounger”, sneering “saw your Bundesliga boy in A&E” (one of many great football references) and acting falsely fine in the histrionic earworm chorus “god only knows why she’s worrying, worrying about me […] each morning, evening, afternoon I want for nothing”.
While this petulance remains a signature, further listening reveals that some things have shifted within Gareth. The world around him is changing, his friends are growing up while he’s “walking dead at 37” without kids.
He’s more aware of how political conflict has grown, dragging us all down into a pit of despair. In the lilting melancholy of “Long Throes” he points out the divisions between generations. The older voters kept voting in the Tories (“the bastards who would sooner annex paradise”), show national pride while the country goes to the dogs and would like to see the police given more powers. Meanwhile, younger people have to make excuses for their parents, want to see the police defunded and hold up heroes who make empty gestures. “I’d like to teach the world to scream at all of the above / Anxieties and maladies and falling out of love,” he finally snaps.
The dystopian aspects of modern life are also a constant. On “A Psychic Wound”, a direct reference to the depression that dogs Gareth and many of our generation, he’s “broke down blubbing at the pharmacy / begging the doc to dispense to me” while “you can buy your hopes and dreams now at the affiliate link”. Climate collapse is never far from his mind, as the sighing, “To Hell In A Handjob” expresses most poignantly. Here, he admits there’s “grief in my flesh and bones” while “we’re waiting at a waning precipice”. This desperation yields to a euphoric melodic surge, backing vocals admitting “this is all we’ve got now” and the band playing like they mean to play out the end of the world in a wave of gorgeous bravado.
After All Hell’s the last interlude, ”III. Surfing a Contrail”, the album concludes on a spectacular final run. In these last three songs, Gareth does his best to push down the anger and bitterness and grasp for beauty. “Moonstruck” finds our hero overcome by the silvery moonlight illuminating the world around him like a selenograph, “it’s hard to find the romance / in a town not known for sunsets” – just when he might have given up, he casts aside the end of the world and focuses on the power of love; “You and me, antipodes / The Earth’s collapse, we finally meet”. The following “0898 HEARTACHE” again finds him envisioning his end, but he sees the peacefulness in being returned to the earth, becoming one with nature, the idyll wrought in subtle slivers of violin and tight harmonies alongside their signature guitar chug.
The album concludes on “Adult Acne Stigmata”, an acoustic ballad where Gareth gets to show off how sweet he can make his voice. It’s a perfect ribbon on the record, bringing everything full circle; adolescent worries in an adult mind, a feeling of being out of place, a cosmic yearning for personal love and peace, and a susceptibility to beauty even amongst a world that is full of division and destruction.
“We both know too well / It’s all hell,” he sighs, rounding out the album. Looking around at the modern social and political landscape, it can be hard to disagree. But when you have a vital, vigorous force like Los Campesinos! flying the flag for empathy, doing it with panache while keeping themselves grounded, you feel like you can keep on fighting.
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