Los Campesinos! and Parenthetical Girls
Bimbo's 365 Club, San Francisco, CA
June 6, 2008

On a comfortable early summer evening i met Veronica downtown and we headed over to North Beach and Bimbo's 365 Club. We had tickets for the evening's performance by Welsh indie pop/punk collective Los Campesinos!, although in the time between when we bought our tickets and when the show arrived both of our interests had waned. I revisited their debut album on Canadian wonder-label Arts & Crafts the day of the show, and my attention was drawn enough to convince Veronica to use our tickets. I met her in the city and we drove over to North Beach for a pre-show dinner at Burgermeister. We had intended to miss openers Parenthetical Girls as neither of us had heard of them before, but our dinner proceeded faster than expected and we arrived at the venue smack in the middle of their set. A quartet of four thrift shop-clad young men, three of them looked scared shitless to look up from their instruments. Those instruments being drums, guitar, and xylophone. The fourth, however, was the singer and provided enough kooky antics for the lot. In the second song we saw, he descended into the still sparsely occupied dance floor below the stage and meandered around singing. He also provided a bizarre set of gestures and hand motions to accompany his lilting vocal style. The music was a sort of subdued indie pop, with minimalist instrumental backing. Not the most attention grabbing performance, despite the singer's gesticulating. Two songs before they concluded, the drummer announced the singer had drunk a Red Bull before the show and was in rare form. Obviously. And to offer a suitably bizarre conclusion to a bizarre set, the final song was a cover of O.M.D.'s "Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)". Oooookay ... where the hell did that come from? The group took a sort of improvised Mogwai meets Belle and Sebastian approach to the song, with bandmembers successively abandoning their instruments to pound on the drumkit until they closed with all four banging away. Parenthetical Girls's set wasn't necessarily horrible, just decidedly odd.

The seven-piece Welsh headliners (i had mistakenly assumed they were Canadian as they're on the Arts & Crafts label) came on after a twenty minute intermission and launched into "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats", with bandmembers alternately shouting the "One! Two! Three! Four!" that opens the track. It was a strange juxtaposition to see the jubilant, energetic Campesinos play their enthusiastic indie pop right after the downtempo Parenthetical Girls. And also, to use a xylophone as a crucial element of the fun instead of a dirge accompaniment. Singers Aleks and Gareth's vocal interplay was well represented live, with the silly yet deceptively profound lyrics going between Aleks's smooth croon and Gareth's thick British sneer. As could be expected for a new band, the set list was drawn almost exclusively from their recent debut album, including single "Death to Los Campesinos!", "You! Me! Dancing!", "Don't Tell Me to Do the Math(s)", and the comparatively epic "This Is How You Spell "Hahaha, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics"". The bouncy, head bobbing songs belie the message of the lyrics to not look for too much meaning in pop music ("four sweaty boys with guitars tell me nothing about my life"), but the band places a solid emphasis on fun. Gareth maintained a good rapport with the crowd, discussing the band's visit to San Francisco and ranking the show relative to others on their current tour. We ultimately came in second behind Eugene, Oregon, but i was thrilled that Gareth qualified that scoring with "hey, you're definitely above L.A.". The show came to a close with (i think) "2007, The Year Punk Broke (My Heart)", with the drummer rushing up from the back of the stage to hop into the front of the crowd and pound his hands together as the rest of the band swelled to a climax. A perfect encapsulation of the camaraderie and jovial nature of the performance. The show reinvigorated my interest in Los Campesinos!, and had me proclaiming to all my friends that this was the best show i'd seen all year.

not sure if you mind if i dance with you
but i don't think right now you care about anything at all
and if only there were clothes on the floor
i'd feel for certain i was bedroom dancing
and it's all flailing limbs at the front line
every single one of us is twisted by design
and dispatches from the back of my mind
say so long as we're here everything is alright

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