Los Campesinos! : All Hell

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Los Campesinos all hell review

If you’re a band who has very much made your name through songs and albums that showcase an obsessive, near-Victorian fascination with heartbreak, sex and death, how long can you sustain your trademark angst before it starts to lose its charm? Not by your seventh album, that’s for sure—at least, not if you’re cracking out the same kind of mature songwriting and darkly comforting ironic witticisms as Los Campesinos! are on All Hell, anyway. Their first full-length release in seven years, it succeeds in being both fresh and familiar as it celebrates and emphasizes elements of their past discography without seeking simply to regurgitate it.

As is par for the course with Britain’s first and only emo band (that’s how they refer to themselves, at least, although the phrase “citation needed” comes to mind), All Hell is full to the brim of smart, bleak, terrifying, and gorgeous lyricism that revisits some of the band’s favorite themes with an invigorating sense of poetry and humor. Examples are too numerous—the lyrics on this record no doubt constitute some of the best in the band’s career—but a few lines that really stick out come from “Long Throes,” where Gareth Paisey spells out the difference between bands who engage with “posturing and with empty gestures and with watered down activism as marketing,” and Los Campesinos!, who express themselves with a rather different mission statement: “My and my friends are sadists,” Paisey sings proudly, “I’d like to teach the world to scream at all of the above / Anxieties and maladies and falling out of love.”

Instrumentally, All Hell is not quite as scrappy or manic as the band have been in the past, though it does outdo the band’s former releases in terms of the gentle, melodic, beautiful layering of much of its instrumentation. The album makes frequent use of atmospheric intros, outros, and interludes, defined by pretty, glistening sparks and twinkles—sometimes the result of some delicate guitar work, sometimes something else entirely—that float into your ears on a dense, fuzzy lather of humming, distortion and noise.

There’s no denying that these soundscapes are intelligently and spectacularly crafted. But they do run into the problem of diminishing returns when paired with the band’s use of the relatively mellow, measured sound that dominates the first third-to-a-half of the album; the ultimate effect is to leave All Hell spending more time than necessary feeling rather sedate. It doesn’t quite get into its stride—hitting its breakthrough moment, an emotional earthquake where the intensity of the music finally catches up to the urgency of the lyrics—until its second act, beginning with track eight, “II. Music for Aerial Toll House.” 

And that’s the thing about Los Campesinos!; if there’s one thing you don’t want nor expect from these guys, it’s half-measures. The songs they put out are not merely sad; they are—at their best—dealing in the very essence of horrible, skittish, disemboweling tragedy. Which is why it’s a great shame that the one thing that holds All Hell back from being as impactful as it really should be is the fact it takes just a little too long to get off the ground, choosing instead to spend its time focused on a sound that’s sweet, and dreamy, but also, essentially, passive. Had they avoided this route, the record might well have ended up being their strongest release since We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. But they didn’t, and so—regrettably—it isn’t. While it falls just short of triumph, perhaps it’s a slight miss frustrating enough to make it all but guaranteed that Los Campesinos’ next effort will certainly be an unassailable emo masterpiece.


Label: Heart Swells

Year: 2024


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Los Campesinos all hell review

Los Campesinos! : All Hell

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