Los Campesinos! and Titus Andronicus
Youth gone wild at the Parish
Youth gone wild at the Parish
Erik Adams
"Oh no! I forgot to send that thank you card to Grandma Campesino!"
At the end of the band’s debut record, Hold On Now Youngster… , Los Campesinos! front-kid Gareth Campesinos marks 2007 as the year that punk rock broke his heart. He didn’t have to wait long for the genre to repair the damage. His own band, along with a far-flung assemblage of acts including Titus Andronicus, Fucked Up, Love Is All, Vivian Girls, and Times New Viking forged 2008’s best guitar-rock releases by adapting punk attitude for the late ‘00s (i.e., "Things are bad, but not as bad as they’re going to be tomorrow") while treating the genre’s musical traditions like Silly Putty, expanding and contracting the sounds as they saw fit. As if to strengthen the implied connection between these bands, whoever was in charge of the between-set house music during Friday’s Los Campesinos! and Titus Andronicus show at the Parish Room cued up some Love Is All and Vivian Girls as well as a deep cut from Weezer’s Pinkerton, an admitted influence on Titus Andronicus, and a spiritual forbearer to Los Campesinos' angry/lonely/noisy “extended EP” We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed.
As their band members’ interactions evidenced, the connection between the show’s headliner and touring support is more than just theoretical. Titus frontman Patrick Stickles implored the audience to wish a happy birthday to keyboard-playing Campesino Aleksandra, while Gareth Campesino said the bands were “fast becoming best, best buddies.” Stickles returned to the stage to add some throat-shredding heft to the “We kid ourselves there’s future in the fucking / But there is no fucking future” bridge of We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed’s title track, then transferred the communal energy from artists to crowd via a stage dive. With couples unashamedly acting out the lyrics to “You! Me! Dancing!” and the monitors temporarily hijacked by an awkward, excitable youth who was pretty much Los Campesinos! personified, it was a night where crowd surfing seemed necessary rather than annoying. (Though Broken Social Scene’s Charles Spearin, standing by the bar and perhaps acting as a chaperone from the Arts & Crafts label, seemed less than amused by the antics.)
Disorder was the, um, order of the evening, though you couldn’t tell by watching Los Campesinos! violinist Harriet Campesino—like the Ramones, the Campesinos are a happy, fake family—who demurely bowed her instrument while guitarists Tom and Neil Campesino crashed about mere feet away. The feedback that crackles through We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed was present here as well, though the sour faces of some fans in the front row indicated they prefer the unsullied, urgent melody of “International Tweexcore Underground” to its new, noisy intro. Titus Andronicus similarly added some aural scum to a history-damning single from last century: Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands.” “Bruce is number one,” the New Jersey-bred Stickles said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t ‘Born In The U.S.A.’” Please don't apologize, dude. It’s not very punk rock.
