Send "Los Campesinos! " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 One of the earliest Los Campesinos! singles came with a daisy chain of paper dolls tucked into the sleeve, each Campesino! holding hands and smiling wide. Had a razorblade popped out of 2008's We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, I doubt anyone would've blinked an eye. Over the past three years, Los Campesinos! transformed themselves from a smart, spry, neon pop group possessed with a seemingly boundless everykid exuberance to a bunch of noisy, angry, funny weirdos. Their near-blindingly bright debut LP, Hold On Now Youngster, sat on shelves for a scant eight months before the group followed it with We Are Beautiful, a squalid spleen-venter. They started touring with noise-rock bands. Gareth Campesinos!, lead shouter/songwriter, began barking for heavy stuff like Xiu Xiu and Parenthetical Girls on their Twitter; then, they got the guy from Xiu Xiu to guest on their latest record. In practically a year's time, Gareth went from phrase-turning, scene-critiquing clever kid to a sadsack of Steven Patrick Morrissey proportions, while his band loosened up and billowed out, their grandiose pop growing at once messier and more symphonic. It's all been pretty good.And it all comes to a head here on Romance Is Boring, their third proper LP. All that they've managed to do over the three short years-- the not-so-quiet confidence and compositional precision of their earlier work, the weary weather-beaten sound of We Are Beautiful, and of course Gareth's hilarious, grotesque, and immensely affecting character sketches-- finds its way onto Romance. And Gareth, poor hilarious Gareth, though still very concerned with the goings-on around his navel, has turned his gaze outward just a bit; heck, the first line on the record has him pleading to "talk about you for a minute." They're still utter musical maximalists, still loath to shout when the time calls, and still led by a perpetual malcontent, but Romance Is Boring feels like the payoff of three years of extremely hard work; Gareth may never settle down exactly, but his band's sure getting some stuff figured out....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| What misdirection, that title. Los Campesinos!, a band focused entirely on the messy entanglements that come with love and its attendants (like breakups and a girl not liking K Records), have decided Romance Is Boring. Tongue in cheek? You bet. Three songs here are predicated on the notion that there is a list of 200 heart-wrenching breakups that is discussed by talking heads on TV. On their third album (second, if you ask the band members, who don’t count the splendid We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed), they are still very concerned with romance, but the notable thing isn’t that; it’s that the members of Los Campesinos! have, over the course of having 2009 off, morphed into the most confident twee-indie-pop band on the planet. Romance Is Boring might sound, in description and on wax, very similar to the band’s work, but there’s a palpable confidence here that wasn’t present just an album ago, and it makes Romance Is Boring the key entry in an already ballooning discography. ...full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| 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....full text |
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