How does one best measure the Los Campesinos! experience—in years or albums? Sexual humiliations or World Cup disappointments? Pints of lager or mouthfuls of vomit? Whichever you prefer, they’ve come a long way to reach a recognizable form of “maturity.” All Hell, the Welsh band’s seventh album, ends with a solo acoustic guitar, musings on the afterlife, and hushed backup vocals that make it kinda sound like a late-period Blur song. True to form, it’s also called “Adult Acne Stigmata.”If the embarrassments of adolescence have become badges of honor in adulthood, well…there’s probably a Los Campesinos! album to which you have an unhealthy attachment, so I won’t dishonor that by calling All Hell their best. But it is unquestionably the ultimate Los Campesinos! album. Self-referential, self-funded, self-managed, self-released, and self-produced, All Hell is a triumphant validation for the coalition Los Campesinos! have amassed in two decades of wandering the margins: emo-curious indie adults, indie-curious emo kids, DIY scenesters and Genius annotators, avid consumers of hard cider and hard-left politics, obsessives of European football and American Football alike.To call All Hell a form of fan service is hardly a slight, since that’s been the entire point of Los Campesinos! from their very beginning—from their early zines to the “Blood Pact” badge to the “Doomed” football jerseys to their listening party bingo cards or even just the socialist leanings inherent in their name. Throughout their new record, Gareth David pledges allegiance to Hunt sabs and ACABs, secular girls with Catholic guilt, backbreakers of the spineless, cheapskates with costly words. Conversely, the ever-present “them” in positions of authority are anonymous and off-screen, interested solely in protecting their power. “Tell me how many hours in any single dull day/Can I pray to a league table but still it don’t change?” he sneers on “Long Throes,” a perfect expression of the existential dread that comes after years believing that outcomes in politics, sports, or the supernatural could actually be changed by the average person.Maybe there’s a German word that captures this feeling, but until then, Gareth does his best with a series of truly one-of-one metaphors. As ever, the dizzying array of football, video game, and wrestling references illuminate rather than obscure the syllabus of “adult friendship…drinking for fun and drinking for misery…the heart as an organ and as a burden…climate apocalypse.” The grim jest of life is a “cavalcade through antemortem, terminal suburban boredom,” ground-level organizing is “pooling pennies for the coin-op guillotine”; lust is rendered as familiar greed (“You’re a million bucks and I am avarice”), whereas the climate apocalypse might come before finding true love (“You and me, antipodes/The Earth’s collapse, we finally meet”).
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