Los Campesinos!: Romance is Boring

Music Reviews Los Campesinos!
Los Campesinos!: Romance is Boring

A grown-up examination of young love

Barely a year after this Welsh band’s We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed listed scattered hookups and throw-ups, Romance Is Boring elaborates on the cause of it all: a girl with remarkable moles on her back.

This emotionally turbulent journey underpins the band’s best lyrics yet, as it thrashes between drunken begging and dangerous insults: “I am a pleasure cruise, you are gone out to trawl / Return nets empty, nothing at all.”

Fuzzy atmospherics crash in, overpowering some of Romance’s most brutal quips, forcing the band to struggle at making its musings rhythmic and begging for its earlier punk-twee punctuation. But at the end of this swirling mixture of radio noise and catchy choruses, Romance reiterates the point of both musical and emotional growth: to remember the past, not relive it.

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