There’s a monthly club night in North London called Twee As Fuck. Billing itself as the night out for people who enjoy “picnics and coach parties and indiepop and dancing till you’re dizzy,” it’s a curiously infantilized world where girls wear hairslides and guys with 20/20 vision wear pebble specs because it increases their chances of pulling (that’s not a snide dig; it really happens). The music of Bis features heavily.
Another band that traditionally generates mayhem – well, pigeon-toed shuffling – on the dancefloor is Cardiff’s Los Campesinos!, a seven-strong gang of vegan ex-students whose satchel-swinging brand of bashful guitar-jangle makes The Magic Numbers sound like Avenged Sevenfold.
Their new single My Year In Lists would seem initially to conform to stereotype – is there a more twee opening line in history than, “You said, Send me stationery to make me horny”? Keep listening, though, and it becomes clear that the cutesiness is a mere carapace, there to paper over a gnawing sense of futility. Welcome to a world where, “Every midnight sees the countdown to another awful day”, where dispiriting circumstance stomps on your fingers “as you’re clinging on to the abyss.” Existence, in short, is untrammeled agony – and no amount of picnics or coach parties or multi-coloured stationery is going to change that.
Los Campesinos!’s debut album Hold On Now, Youngster is out now. My Year In Lists is out 21 April.
DUETS Metallica headline our On The Road special; plus Flight Of The Conchords,The
Raconteurs and and a very candid Boy George ... all in the new issue
There’s a monthly club night in North London called Twee As Fuck. Billing itself as the night out for people who enjoy “picnics and coach parties and indiepop and dancing till you’re dizzy,” it’s a curiously infantilized world where girls wear hairslides and guys with 20/20 vision wear pebble specs because it increases their chances of pulling (that’s not a snide dig; it really happens). The music of Bis features heavily.
