Los Campesinos! and Titus Andronicus at Rathskeller
Tiffany Mason
Gareth Campesinos in action.
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Can we have Club 770 back, please? Warts and all, it may have been a bit more functional than UW’s other concert cafeteria, the Rathskeller. The kids showed up early to Friday night’s Los Campesinos! and Titus Andronicus show, filling up the area in front of the Rathskeller’s inches-high stage (that is, the only place with much of a view, if people are standing) a good 40 minutes before things got started. A bunch of folks got corralled into an area to the side of the stage, clustered around a clearly delighted sound guy.
Luckily, these bands know how to make a screwy mess of a venue work in their favor. The sweat condensed in the air, and Titus Andronicus’ blur of oversized, earnest punk and garage-rock just made it thicker and thicker. Soon, most of the kids up front were bracing themselves against the friendly pushing and crowd-surfing behind them with one foot against the stage, some even keeping a hand on a monitor or mic stand. Instead of grinding its influences down to something mean and fake-badass the way some bands in the garage-rock revival have done, Titus sounds off like an overdriven megaphone, embracing the fighting spirit of a drunken 16-year-old.
Shaggy lead singer Patrick Stickles flopped around stage, flooding his mic with yelped vocals and harmonica, taking an extra drumstick to drummer Eric Harm’s cymbals, and switching off between guitar and a mini-keyboard. When a guy jumped onstage and got in Stickles' face during a cover of Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner,” Stickles screamed the lyrics right at him, holding the mic right between their mouths. As the set closed out with the frantic ranting of “Titus Andronicus,” it felt a bit better, even downright exciting, to be trapped in all that humid body heat.
The seven Welsh-folk of Los Campesinos! whipped up still more good-natured audience chaos. A few brave photographers, including 77 Square’s Emily Mills and Decider's own Tiffany Mason, kneeled up in front despite the risk (a horde of people weighing 90 pounds each adds up, after all). As he powered to a finish on “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks,” lead singer Gareth Campesinos entered the crowd, which from Decider’s vantage point seemed to swallow him up like a blob. It might’ve been a little scary if he hadn’t kept singing, or if a crewman hadn’t rushed up to grab the mic cable, holding on tight as if trying to reel Gareth back in.
The crowd’s fits of sing-along flailing knocked Gareth’s glockenspiel to the floor during “This Is How You Spell: ‘HAHAHA, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics,’” but the roadies got it back on its stand without too much fuss. Yes, rock has evolved from smashed guitars to this, yet there was nothing precious about the way Gareth hammered out those glockenspiel lines with his little twinkle-wand, in between parts on the keyboard and two drums at his station. It wouldn’t be fair to call the band’s music “twee pop” after seeing them blitz through it with just as much noisy force as their tourmates.
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