Los Campesinos! demonstrate their cross-generational, sing-able indie appeal
Los Campesinos! supported by ME REX | New Century Hall, Manchester | 22nd September 2024
Reviewed by Sam Lamplugh
Millennials and Gen Z don’t get on, apparently. Or so I’m told, to co-opt a lyric from Los Campesinos!, who played their first show in Manchester for seven years at New Century Hall on Sunday, by “people I’ve nothing but trust in.” However, the mingling queue of block-fringed teenagers and greying adults at the merch stand (a queue this writer joined at an apparent juncture only to find snaked through three repetitions before its true end point) is an early indicator that, here at least, the conflict is overstated: advertiser’s hoodoo; a false flag of difference, masking what is shared and therefore actually meaningful.
The queue shrinks slightly when the opening band, London three-piece ME REX, burst into the first of several well-received and shapely bangers, Empty Country-reminiscent guitar licks chatting with ¡Forward Russia! synth tones and layered with Haim-adjacent harmonised vocals gamely shouted back by a good chunk of the audience, younger and older alike. A fun gig game is to identify those who are there for the support band: one bespectacled suburban dad at the centre made for an easy victory in this case, his voice like a fourth vocalist, the lost REXle, bobbing head constant and hands madly gesticulating throughout. When the guitarist wryly remarks that “this is probably going to be the biggest crowd we’ll ever play to,” I wonder briefly if there’s some fine gauze between band and audience we can’t see, blocking their view. Even so, they must surely have heard their fourth vocalist’s reply, succinctly boomed across the floor: “Bollocks!”
ME REX are only nine years old in band years (the same as human years, only gleaned exclusively from Wikipedia and ignorant of much of the long negotiating period which inevitably presages any actual songs). Time enough for them yet, particularly considering the lifespan of the main act, who released their seventh album in July, the self-released All Hell, sixteen years since their 2008 debut and indie benchmark Hold on Now, Youngster, back in the days when ‘austerity’ was a low-scoring waste of Scrabble letters as opposed to a failed Tory project and the dark heart of a new, nominally Labour government.
Los Campesinos! have always been attuned to the politics of protest, lead singer Gareth David’s lyrics a snaking map of self-reference, obscure football ephemera and barbs orbiting the interpersonal cost of governmental cruelty, and it is perhaps this lyrical consistency across the band’s output which holds onto older fans who have otherwise shed the angsty guitar music of their youth while also attracting a new crowd of freshly-disaffected youngsters, just beginning to understand the extent to which things are stacked against them. The seven members of the band mount a stage bedecked in banners demanding rights and healthcare for trans folk; equity for all and justice for Gaza: their packed assemblage, strength in numbers in a small space, adds gravity and heft to the proceedings. Songs about love, loss, and prescription drugs become grand, hopeful and fun when echoed among a crowd that replies with a single voice to every line.
The primary verb for every Los Campesinos! gig crowd I have ever been part of, from Birmingham in 2008 to Manchester a few days ago, is ‘bellow.’ When a new album comes out, it’s exciting to see whether the lyrics you’ve been bellowing in your head are the same chosen by a crowd, and ‘A Psychic Wound,’ from All Hell, barely four months old and the band’s opener, releases the first of the night within thirty seconds, as we are all “Tied to the pulse of the sea”. From there, the crowd is one, through a dizzying hour and a half of near-constant music, each line bellowed by someone somewhere, uniting like cresting waves for old mainstays (the “it seems unfair” refrain of 2017’s ‘I Broke Up in Amarante’; the as-true-now-as-then “I think we need more post-coital and less post-rock” of 2009’s ‘Straight in at 101’; the mournful “goodbye courage, hello sadness again” of 2011’s ‘Hello Sadness’). The band knows this, they make space for it, but there is none of the microphone-brandished-into audience mouths posturing of other acts, instead pure performance; seasoned professionals at the top of their game.
After fourteen songs, Gareth announces that the remainder of the set will be “wall-to-wall bangers.” A familiar voice responds from the centre of the crowd, the fourth member of the opening act now absorbed into the unitary mass: “They’re all bangers!” At the bar, a mum-and-dad pair styled Oasis-ly raise eyebrows in surprise at their own enjoyment, won round by their teenage daughter’s new favourite band. To the Gen Z fans, I say: thanks for helping my favourite band keep going. And to their parents, the Gen Xers and Boomers who are supposed to hate me in turn, I say: see you at the next one, where you can bellow along with the rest of us and feel, for a little while, that maybe what unites is stronger than that which divides.
Los Campesinos! continue their tour in Bristol on September 27th, followed by further dates in Brighton and Birmingham, supported throughout by ME REX.
All Hell is available through Heart Swells, and ME REX’s most recent EP Smilodon is available through BSM Records.
Reviewed by Sam Lamplugh