Los Campesinos
You Say Party We Say Die!
Sky Larkin

Lancaster Library:
Get It Loud in Libraries
6 October 2007

Reviewed by Tamar Newton

This is just weird. It’s half past seven on a Saturday night and the sound of guitars rumbles through the twilight of the town square. From the library. Overexcited tweenagers shriek and the pigeons take one astonished look and disappear.

A slightly embarrassed looking bouncer in suit and headphones mills pointlessly about and it’s another gaggle of glitter bedecked teenagers who take our tickets before pointing us past ‘Reservations’ and into the music library, an award winning initiative from Lancashire Council to get kids into libraries - not by anything as old hat as rhapsodising over the joys of Chekhov but by buying thousands of cutting edge albums and music books and getting a big fuck off PA and some real live bands to strut their stuff in a minuscule stage in front of the DVD section.

Recently, Bat For Lashes enticed an older, balder crowd in but now heads are rocking furiously, skinny arms are pounding the rarefied air and screams abound. And nobody is even on stage yet. I yearn for vodka but there are only jelly sweets. I feel old, frowsy, fat but strangely charged, energised and pensive for that time when seeing a band live was the most exciting thing in the whole damn world and the sight of The Family Cat’s rusty Ford Transit outside a provincial club the most glamorous thing in the whole world ever.

Sky Larkin, first support are a demure and self-effacing act but with front woman Katie’s raw emotive howl of a voice giving each song a primitive charge (think the Delgados getting roughed up by Hole). The guitarist looks like he’s swooning, the drummer grimaces but I still yearn for vodka and a nice sit down.

With the arrival of You Say Party, We Say Die’s explosive Becky Ninkovic to the stage comes a pubescent crush to the front, all staring in awe at her outfit of a camel toe hugging red bodysuit, red lipstick and demonically glittering eyes. ‘They’re from Canada!’ a young girl breathlessly sighs.

A melee of gleeful chants, bad cheerleader anthems and pure, pure fun, YSPWSD are a revelation. Becky stalks, swaggers and shimmies as bassist Steven in John Travoltaesque torso hugging white t-shirt and jeans jumps to the top of the speakers and is sexily silhouetted against the Talking Books. There are handclaps, there are those gloriously poppy choruses that lodge in your head instantly and there’s Becky who is impossible to ignore - especially when she stands in front of you touching the tip of your nose before leaping into the crowd to curl up on the floor, still singing like a canary as a sea of camera phones flash down at her instead of faces.

If you thought eye rolling the preserve of teenagers and horses, then you have not witnessed Gareth, petulant front man of Cardiff’s Los Campesinos. With eyes rolling skyward, limp wrists fluttering, he makes Dale Winton seem butch. A half shouting, half singing squall of a voice rises above a surprising wash of sound from, err.. a violin, xylophone and glockenspiel. It’s a happy sound but with a manic angry twist - sugar coated violence from a troupe of seemingly thousands onstage (well seven) but dominated by Gareth's camply furious presence.

‘International TweeCore Underground’ brings back half-buried memories of Bis but audience members too young to remember such ‘delights’ leap to their anthem shouting along to lyrics such as “Henry Rollins meant nothing to me’ in hysteric delight. Again the tunes are instant, the hit immediate as voices chime together in unity. It’s contained messiness, theatrics and excitement - an event. Gareth dives into the crowd and thrashes about and a couple of hundred malleable souls all decide to sod the GCSE's and become a rock star.

© Tamar Newton 10.10.07