Three Imaginary Girls - Arts & Crafts

Los Campesinos at the Showbox on May 4: I'm so excited I want to jump in a vat of glitter

imaginary liz — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:58:00 +0000

(Photo by Laura Musselman from the Three Imaginary Girls Flickr Photo Pool)

Our dear Los Campesinos! friends from Cardiff have overcome a lot to join us this Tuesday (May 4th) at the Showbox the Market. For days (felt like weeks!) the band was unable to leave the UK, trapped at the airport and a nearby airport hotel because of a wacky volcanic-ash-related supernatural event. The whole affair, which they playfully documented on their blog with some fine video work, made up a bit for all that worrying.

They ended up having to cancel the first few dates of their US tour, but (thankfully) they are back on track and will be in Seattle for an all-ages show on Tuesday, May 4 at the Showbox at the Market (!!!!!). Just think how amazing their rambunctious clashing of indie-pop exuberance and sophisticated post-fi will sound with all those pretty chandeliers and tiered, ample dancing room! It's going to be pretty rad indeed. As rad as a hottub full of Campesinos.

We all have our favorite LC! songs we want to hear next Tuesday. Their back catalog alone makes me weak in the knees when I think of the set list possibilities. But as far as choices from the new album, I'm counting down to seeing "A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me To Charlotte" and the new album's title track (Romance is Boring) performed live. Actually, with a track-listing like this to choose from, they can't go wrong when putting together the evening's mix:

1. In Medias Res
2. There Are Listed Buildings
3. Romance Is Boring
4. We've Got Your Back
5. Plan A
6. 200 - 102
7. Straight In At 101
8. Who Fell Asleep
9. I Warned You: Do Not Make An Enemy Of Me
10. Heart Swells / 100-1
11. I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know
12. A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me To Charlotte
13. The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future
14. This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind
15. Coda: A Burn Scar In The Shape of the Sooner State

All this excitement makes me want to dip my lips in glue and jump into glitter. That'd be going too far, right?

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed and we can hear the new Los Campesinos! record now

imaginary liz — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:26:28 +0000

The physical awesome digipack ultra sup'd up package of the album releases in late November, but you can hear the full album as soon as you pre-order it! Like right now!!!

New Broken Social Scene presents... leaks, Canning reacts

Jon Harthun — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 03:29:53 +0000

An unmastered version of the latest Broken Social Scene presents... installment has recently leaked, causing the latest featured musician, Brendan Canning, to react by posting the album digitally before it's release date of June 22nd.

A hot tub full of Campesinos!

imaginary liz — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:53:19 +0000

You might already know this, but there are a ton of reasons I've fallen in love with Los Campesinos (and why I've been counting down to their show at Neumos this Saturday).

Win tickets to see Los Campesinos! at Neumos (!!!)

three imaginary girls — Mon, 26 May 2008 04:16:40 +0000

The Camps will be in town with Portland, OR's Parenthetical Girls andwill be playing an all-ages show at Neumos on Friday, May 30th and Three Imaginary Girls is over the moon excited to award a lucky imaginary reader with a pair of tickets to the big show.

Hold On Now, Youngster...

Erik Gonzalez — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:35:18 +0000

8.5

http://www.amazon.com/Hold-Now-Youngster-Los-Campesinos/dp/B00142RWY0/wwwthreeimagi-20/

Loscampesinos.jpg

I thought I'd start this review with a picture of an adorable bunny.

Isn't that cute?

That is the animal world representation of Los Campesinos! When the band goes home at night after fighting corruption and injustice in the world, they morph into adorable bunnies. That is how cute they are. That is their schtick, if you will, to batter you with cuteness, like a Louisville Slugger made of pure love. There is nothing particularly wrong with that, in fact, it is their strength. They cull bits of many of the bands we all know and love: Rilo Kiley's charm, Pavement's sloppy anarchism, Art Brut's rock and roll abandon, and they combine them into their own mold. Sure, to an extent, they can come across as a one-trick pony if you're not into being seduced by delightfulness, but if you are, you don't stand a chance against Los Campesinos!

Hold On Now, Youngster ... runs a fairly straight-forward formula. The song starts off restrained, ideas of love and devotion and cuteness are presented, the band then rocks out with about million members (ok, really 7). You could say that Los Campesinos! (and no, not Spanish, but Welsh) exist as post-emo, taking the abrasive, wall-of-sound of those angry post-punk (sorry about all the jargon, but its necessary here) like the Get Up Kids or the Anniversary and converting it from the gloom and doom that those bands explored to a tsunami of pure fun. Imagine, if you will, fusing the DNA of Tullycraft and someone like the Buzzcocks or Mission of Burma into a single chimera. That is Los Campesinos! "Death to Los Campesinos!" fits this mold perfectly, as the album open with this song about wanting to be a robot set to a tune that sounds like the band is potentially on fire. You can't help but be charmed by their attempt to be mechanical with they throw out lines like "If you catch me with my hands in the till/I promise, sugar, I wasn't trying to steal/I'm just swimming in copper/to smell and pretend like a robot." Now that, my friends, is endearing ... in a horribly creepy sort of way.

If anything, Los Campesinos! seem to have two setting on their blender: very slow and frantic. "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats" is of the latter population, sounding like an emergency put to tape. You wonder if the band noticed a horde of wild dogs trying to get into the studio when they were recording, it has that sort of desperate energy. However, this full-on frenzy approach might not be the band at their best. No, it is songs like "Don't Tell Me to do the Math(s)" or "You! Me! Dancing!", where the band build and release the musical drama throughout that are really captivating. "Don't Tell Me to do the Math(s)" is perfect nerd-rock, making reference to Communist Russia and the Dewey Decimal System amongst other intellectual ideals, it comes across almost like an academic Replacements track. The revised (from the Sticking Fingers into Sockets EP) version of "You! Me! Dancing!" take a while to get moving, but the massive xylophone line (yes, I am a sucker for that) makes the song remarkably entertaining. Then, of course, Los Campesinos! discusses the idea that cute stationary can lead to foreplay (and beyond) on "My Year in Lists", a song that also is an excellent example of the fact you never know what/how many instruments the band might break out.

There seems to be a lot of discussion of Los Campesinos! in comparison to Broken Social Scene, which is justified considering they opened for BSS on tour, they're signed to Arts & Crafts Records and David Newfeld produced the Sticking Fingers into Sockets EP. However, having never really understood the fascination with BSS, I feel like comparing Los Campesinos! with Broken Social Scene does the Welsh band an injustice. Los Campesinos! have an obsession with pop songs at the core of their music, this is evident by the fact that, in anything, the key fault for Hold On Now, Youngster... is that the songs can begin to seem repetitive, slightly formulaic. If doesn't hurt that the formula, to me, is great, but I can understand that many people might just hear a bunch of youth slamming their instruments around, like a more rock oriented Go! Team (exclamation point and all). Los Campesinos! most likely have a lot more, musically, to offer, but right now they seem pretty happy to just rock out (which begs me to ask, why in the name of the Gods did they leave "International Tweexcore Underground" and "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" off the album? Sure, they released them on EPs and singles, but in the U.S., that just doesn't count, especially with two tremendous tracks like those).

Hold On Now, Youngster ... isn't perfect. It is, however, so cute that you can't look away even if you want to. Some of you might be repulsed by this level of adorableness, but for those of you made of stronger stuff, Los Campesinos! are fun, energetic and captivating like opening the refrigerator and finding it full of tiny, frolicking kittens. The band is definitely pandering to the nerdcore scene and that demographic will eat them up, but just because you think you're too cool for that should not turn you away from Los Campesinos! You might just be missing out on the underground summer album of 2008.

Los Campesinos! are fun, energetic and captivating like opening the refrigerator and finding it full of tiny, frolicking kittens.

OMG OMG OMG LOS CAMPESINOS IS GOING TO BE AT SXSW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

imaginary liz — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:03:47 +0000

OMG!!!

Los Campesinos! return to the States, snub Seattle, again

imaginary dana — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:56:35 +0000

I'm starting to think it's personal. UK cuties (and TIG faves) Los Campisinos! are returning to the US -- in fact, they're coming for their west coast debut! -- and yet, no Seattle or Portland tourdates have been announced.

Los Campesinos! tour, but diss west coast. Getting the hankies ready for imaginary Liz.

imaginary dana — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:18:38 +0000

The UK band isn't getting anywhere near roadtrip territory for us west coast folk. Which is sad. Really sad

Tales from a Brave Ulysses

Joseph Riippi — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:00:00 +0000

XXIX. "The Criteria of a Broken Social Scene: Rock versus Roll"

Two concerts on two nights, as two bands from two different communities work towards one common goal: Good music. Success. Make enough money so you can stop working the day job at the computer company or the law firm or the restaurant or the pet store or the advertising firm. Like-minded musicians crawling towards the goal have made a lot of noise in the music world. Saddle Creek; Arts & Crafts. Nebraska; Canada. Criteria; Broken Social Scene. How long can a mecca indie stay afloat before it churns out some shit?

There is music which rocks, and is satisfactory in its ability to make feet tap and block out the thoughts of typical worry. But then there is music which rocks AND rolls, which takes that affection Rocking has, and carries it beyond just the beat and feel. On two nights, I saw Saddle Creek Records' Criteria and Arts & Crafts' Broken Social Scene. One rocked the house, the other rolled with it.

Criteria

You start your night at home with a vodka martini and copy of the latest New York magazine. The Strokes are on the cover, and the novelist Jay McInerney wrote the article. You enjoyed his latest the book, The Good Life, supposedly about post-9/11 New York but more directly about two Manhattanites having an affair during a distressful time. You flip the pages shut and toss the magazine indiscriminately in a pile of belongings made mosty of laundry. Has it really been five years since Is This It? Crazy.

The show is starting late. You check the microwave clock. Is it fast again? Or slow? You check the radio clock. They're one minute apart. Close enough. You leave for the subway, another subway, you walk, you admire the view of the Manhattan skyline from the western side of Williamsburg, and you see that next door Philip Glass is playing piano, but you don't have a ticket. You enter the unsigned club. The doorman just inside comments on your vertical Washington State ID. You laugh politely.

Criteria isn't up for another few acts. Hi-Life is four dollars, coupled with PBR they're the only beers under five. You order one of each, and go look for something to lean against near the stage.

One of the brutal truths of the rock and roll world is that many very good and enjoyable bands get overlooked. Aberdeen City, for example, from Boston, rockers with an attitude of Music is fun before it's anything else. For someone like you, leaning against the side of a floor to ceiling post near stage right, holding the two cheapest beers and here actually to see the headliners, the Rock of a band like Aberdeen City is so, so sweet. You get into it, you move to the music, you make a note on the back of a receipt to look up their Myspace page later to hear their recordings. They Roll with it, unexpectedly, at moments of guitar and vocal harmony both surprising and delightful.

Then Criteria. The two guitarists have matching fancy guitars of a make you do not recognize. They look made of titanium instead of wood, and the band's attitude is that music is all "anything else" before it is fun.

Riff heavy rock coats the audience like a heavy drape being flung over our faces. It's not bad. It's not good. They are the irrelevant middle ground between their perpetually "on hiatus" labelmates Desaparecidos and Seattle's own, more progressive, Blood Brothers. Talented, yet not interesting. Rocking out, yet not affecting. Boredom consumes you. While the music is not bad, there is no reason to listen to it. The solitary affecting effect it has is to make you wish to go home and listen to the Blood Brothers' "Burn, Piano Island, Burn." Your feet stop tapping. You finish a beer. You order another with the next day's lunch money — you have nothing else to do, but you are not the kind of person to walk out in the middle of someone's set. When it's over, you bolt out into cold Brooklyn and walk towards the Manhattan skyline, fingerin g a receipt in your pocket.

(Parentheses)

Saddle Creek Records and Arts & Crafts have both achieved status as hotbeds of independent music &3151 incestuous bands churning out side-projects and guest appearances with hip-hop-like regularity. But both labels as well have their "starting line-ups" of sort. The key band or bands that holds it all together. For Saddle Creek it's Bright Eyes, The Faint, and Cursive. For Arts & Crafts it's Broken Social Scene, which may as well also be the name of the record. Stars, Metric, Apostle of Hustle, and Feist all have some Louisiana bloodline connection.

What these "hotbeds" offer to new projects is an already established following. Jason Collett (one of many guitarists for Broken Social Scene, he just released an excellent solo record) played two shows recently in New York which were highly anticipated amongst the BSS loyal. Likewise, Criteria's anticlimactic show in Brooklyn had received a buzz as "the new Saddle Creek band."

Saddle Creek has a few years on Arts & Crafts when it comes to time in the scene. SC has released many more records and produced many more bands and projects. Their error is there is not much more "new" they can do, yet they continue to release. Son, Ambulance is a somewhat cleverly named yet somewhat unremarkable in every way artist whose two releases have passed as quietly as a falling leaf in a forest in an autumn windstorm, gliding by as part of the overall flow. And Criteria's release is Rock without the Roll. Their set in Brooklyn was Rock with no purpose, with nowhere to go.

Broken Social Scene

Broken Social Scene plays a few days after the Criteria Disappointment. At Webster Hall, a venue much larger, situated near Union Square in Manhattan, there are to be held three shows, three "An Evening with Broken Social Scene" dates appear alongside red "Sold Out!"'s on the Bowery Presents website.

You walk in and stand in the back near the bar. Experience tells you not to drink at the show, for the cheapest beers are 7 dollars, aside from the 5 dollar cans of Budweiser occasionally carried about the crowd as in the bleachers of a summer baseball game. You watch a collection of musicians — 16 people on stage at one point — play music that Rocks and Rolls into new territories. It is affecting, it is interesting, it is an art form. It transcends that glass wall between "enjoyable and fun" and reaches the "truly brilliant" category.

Live, you think, BSS is an entirely different phenomenon than on recorded disc. It is like a terrible catastrophe gone entirely right! As though getting horrible lost in the middle of the night, walking back alleys unrecognizable and averting gazes of men and women terrible in their facial intents, you somehow stumble and fall through a fourth-dimensional gateway into a paragon of bliss and contentedness and bright warm yellow light.

BSS that night was a combination of frontman Kevin Drew, producer Dave Newfeld, various multiinstrumentalists, a member of the Weakerthans, Apostle of Hustle, Emily from Metric, Feist herself, and so many other etceteras. A wonderful set that left everyone not happy or entertained, but affected. It is, you think, exiting the theater and looking for somewhere to buy a cheap beer before catching the subway home, the extraordinary difference between music that simply Rocks, and music that Rocks and Rolls.

ulysses.gif

Tales from a Brave Ulysses is a traveling epic through modern art, music, and culture. In this installment: The Criteria of a Broken Social Scene: Rock versus Roll.

The Last Beautiful Day

Chris Estey — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 07:00:00 +0000

7.8

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000A2H786/wwwthreeimagi-20

newbuffalo05aug.jpg

"It's all right. Here we are, inside."

Darren Seltmann of the Avalanches has a lovely 30 year old wife who likes to stay inside and play with lots of instruments, making up dazzling melodies for delightful songs. The Southern sun of Melbourne, Australia no doubt slobbers down around outside their musical gear-cluttered home as she sings, "Where's the diamond in my messy mind?" Her voice lilts in enchanted waves upwards, forgetting about the time, the next pot of coffee to be made, caught up in the swelling and swooshing keyboards she sings and talks and hums over. "Ideas stacked up high," she sighs, building a lattice-stitched sleeve for us to enjoy them in.

New Buffalo is a town on the shores of Lake Michigan, and it is Sally Seltmann, one of those attractive girls who also happen to be effortlessly talented. She could have been a model or an actress or just a singer's wife, but she's a little weird, too, reclusive and maybe socially awkward. More than that, ambitious — and quietly confident. She really knows how to put songs together, how to bring her voice down low for dramatic effect, how to spin out a sweet line and a frosty description.

Friends come by to assist her — Beth Orton on the somewhat-anthem "Inside," Dirty Three drummer Jim White on a trio of songs — and I imagine they imbibe caffeine or alcohol and play what must be an enormous record collection shared by the Seltmann's, going from the sublime Scottish pop of Belle & Sebastian, to the big band flirtations of Bjork, the happy vulnerability in the vocals Frente's first album, to the textures of late 80s Cocteau Twins, and it just goes on. There's even a little feel of Tom Waits in the swing of some of the vocals. But I have no idea. It just seems this debut full-length is well enough developed and confidently performed, it feels like its been absorbing the best elements of underground pop music for over a decade.

I do know that Seltmann had tried this before earlier in the century, working on an EP with her husband titled About Last Night, which was distributed in England as well as their own country. I've never heard it, so I don't know if she's progressed, but I imagine it was better than the next release — when they took a journey to Los Angeles the next year to work with Madonna and Bjork's producer Jake Davies, and things fell apart. It must have taught Seltmann to trust her own instincts, so she went back home and started over, founding The Lonely Studio, the private kitchen where The Last Beautiful Day was carefully and joyfully created.

Sure, the album doesn't feel like it's necessarily heading anywhere — it's inevitably a pile of ideas, as prophesied by the creator herself. It meanders just when it should bring in something real (in the words, in the music) to make it more than four color, to make it bloom into full technicolor. "Make it come alive," she sings, but it never quite does. But she has served up the tastiest pop pie since Camera Obscura's Underachievers Please Try Harder, and that in itself is worth visiting her kitchen for.

She really knows how to put songs together, how to bring her voice down low for dramatic effect, how to spin out a sweet line and a frosty description.

Bee Hives

Joseph Riippi — Mon, 17 May 2004 07:00:00 +0000

6.5

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001KL5NA/wwwthreeimagi-20

broken.jpg

And the award for most tongue-in-cheek title for a collection of B-sides goes to...

You remember Broken Social Scene, that wondrous indie-rock collective out of Canada whose 2003 release You Forgot it in People was the music-snob's name-drop of November and December? Naturally, when a small label gets a band that can sell records to their niche market like fairies can sell fairy dust to kids at a Peter Pan flight school, then the label gets a surge of happy thoughts and the re-issues and collections of b-sides come soaring in from Neverneverland, and so it is with the band at hand.

Enter Bee Hives, a lovely collection from the folks out at Arts and Crafts. Like its predecessor, it's most definitely a headphones album. However, while the ambience of YFIP is sort of there, and the enigmatic nature is still sort of there, for eight of the nine tracks, the record feels like, well, just a bunch of b-sides.

The album opens with an intro dubiously entitled, "intro." It sounds exactly how you think it might - some distortion, a lot of reverb, and then it's over. That's followed by "Marketfresh," a very decent song in all aspects, and probably got the boot from YFIP's track list in favor of the slightly better "Looks just like the sun." They both have the cool and elaborate acoustic-ness with electronic beeps and blips in the background perfect for collapsing on a couch at four in the morning.

The following instrumental, "Weddings," might have been more aptly titled "Escalator" or "Moving Sidewalk at the Airport When you're really Tired." If you're awake enough to pay attention to what's going on in all the Broken Social Layers, then you'll find it's as much an enjoyable track as the first half of "Da Da Dada," another cut on Beehives taken from the "Cause = Time" 7", but one which about two minutes into the unimpressive instrumental layers at the beginning, opens up with a center staged drum kit and some spacey star-gazer laser effects bouncing back and forth behind. It's a little like how you might remember the music waiting in line for Space Mountain.

But what made You Forgot it in People more great then good was that the record flowed seamlessly from track to track. Like a good March Madness bracket, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so to speak. Therefore it's not surprising that "Beehives" is best enjoyed with the skip button just beneath your finger.

And that skip button brings us to the crowning achievement of "Beehives," a version of the YFIP track, "Lovers' Spit" that could make Jesus weep. Listening to it for the first time on a trip to D.C., my friend had to pull the car over so that we could hear where it was going. Female vocals and solo piano begin, followed by the lyric "All these people drinking lovers' spit / Sit around and clean their face with it," and then it might as well be a choir of blonde, pink-cheeked baby angels who descend and bless you musically through a song which would justify buying the album twice, just in case one burns down in your house with your whole family trapped inside and you need something to listen to for consolation. Hallelujah.

And the award for most tongue-in-cheek title for a collection of B-sides goes to...