By Your Hand
Los Campesinos!

    If Los Campesinos fourth album, Hello Sadness, was a movie, it would be an indie production film that leaves you emotionally drained and feeling sexually deprived. Think Blue Valentine, but far more depressing and lacking the Ryan Gosling charm. The seven member band’s music always makes me nostalgic for high school, despite the fact that my high school experience was far less exciting and emotional.  However, the lead singers anguish and sexual frustration reminds me that of an awkward teenage boy.

    For those of you reading this review that are completely turned off by the description I have given it thus far, please hold your judgments.  While the album has the lyrics that will make you cringe in despair (We burnt all the skin from the palm of my hands, /With an old zippo lighter and deodorant cans,/I went to the palmist and asked her to read:/No heart line, no sun line, no life line, no need), you can’t deny the talent that lies beneath the sorrowful words. Not only are the words something of poetic depth and beauty, but the orchestral music matches the lyrics in a fun and ironic way.  It is certain that the band is back to please on this album in an endearing and fun way that I repeat, reminds you of the bitterness and awkwardness of high school. Still, the album has some depth that is above the juvenile themes of high school.  Although, there are some more juvenile songs (the song “songs about your girlfriend” boasts —“The songs I’ve written about your girlfriend/Are just songs in spite as she came to earnin”)

    “By Your Hand” is an upbeat single that will make you want to get up and dance.  Los Campesinos keeps up with their talking interludes in this song that makes me love them even more.  The album does have a softer side with the single, “Hate For The Island”, as the song starts and ends with silence. It leaves us with an eerie and complacent feeling. It’s a sincerity that Los Campesinos does very well with each song. Each song has something to offer and each lyric is a rhythmic and breathtaking masterpiece.

    Overall, the album is a great fourth album. It is full of hate, love, lust, and sexual obscurity. It is a sick twisted love drama and if you give it a chance, it will make you both nostalgically sad and somehow in a weird twisted way, happy.

“And life, life is a long time, too long to my mind, too long by far
Between my waterfalls and your landslides, there’s cartography in every scar
Life, life is a long time, too long to my mind, too long by far”

By: Sara Azoulay