Los Campesinos! All’s Well That Ends EP [Arts & Crafts]
Reviewed by: Chris Bosman
It was earlier this year that Welsh septet Los Campesinos! released Romance Is Boring, which is either their second or third album depending on how you view the semantics behind 2008’s We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. Romance was a determined new direction for the band, not so much an about-face as it was a firm, unwavering decision to take one fork in the road as opposed to the other. They didn’t forgo their strengths– their excellent talent for endlessly satisfying melodies, their playful but serious but playful sense of humor, their tragicomic storytelling, their exuberant energy– but instead tried to musically highlight the dichotomy that has always been present in Gareth’s lyrics. On some levels, it worked. Romance truly sounds like a band focused on a sound that’s satisfying for them, and it’s the realization of things hinted at in earlier, dissonant tracks like “Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time.” Often, though, the Campesinos wore their Xiu Xiu ambitions too plainly on their sleeves, and the organic nature that sold the most painfully earnest moments of their earlier albums was lost. Too often on Romance, their decision to go noisy seemed to be paradoxically obvious– the opposite of those parent-friendly moves pop singers unconvincingly make when they’re called too risque.
In the wake of Romance comes the All’s Well That Ends EP, a four-track live EP that strips down a few of the latest albums standout tracks, giving them the near-acoustic treatment. It’s a fetishist commodity to be sure, really appropriate only for big fans of the band, as it’s not the kind of concise summation of the band that you’d want to use to introduce a new fan, nor does it offer anything particularly new for those who are on the fence concerning Los Campesinos! Really, whatever you feel about the band, All’s Well That Ends isn’t going to change your mind.
That said, it’s not exactly without its merits. For those interested, the differences– and similarities– between these tracks and their album counterparts is revealing. On the album, the title track spat venom through an ugly, twisted sneer as Gareth sang, “We’re proving to each other that romance is boring.” On the All’s Well “Princess Version,” that same line seems sullen and resigned, repainting the song’s attitude entirely, without changing a word. “Letters From Me to Charlotte (RSVP)” forgoes Gareth’s singing for the first half, instead switching to the two female singers, making the song’s yellow-gold bruise more vivid. The minimalist instrumentation makes the winding violins that swoop in, aching and yawning over the acoustic guitar chords, quite emotional. And when Gareth does come in, the chords are performed almost completely a cappella, and it’s a beautiful moment. On “Straight in at the 101/It’s Never Enough”, the bareness of the post-coital/post-rock comparison should be off-putting, but the splashes of piano chords and doubled vocals make it seem cringe-worthy in a totally different– and embarrassingly relatable– way. And closer “(All’s Well That Ends) In Media Res”, aside from being a clever play on words, minimizes its original, uber-dissonant bridge to single piano notes, and the song is smoother for it.
All’s Well That Ends winds up being more cohesive than the album that it culls its tracks from. Some of this is because of instrumentation, of course. By limiting their musical palette, the songs have no choice but to sound more like each other. And another reason is that the track list the band has chosen for the EP includes four of the more classic-sounding Los Campesinos! tracks that were on Romance. But more, it’s because these songs seem to simply work better unfettered. The more experimental moments of the album seemed tacked on or simply unnatural. By contrast, these stripped down versions by necessity eliminate those unnecessary elements. This presents listeners with a more focused sound, and ultimately a cleaner look at what makes this band’s songs so good. Where Romance Is Boring was the great and mighty Oz, All’s Well That Ends gives us the man behind the curtain, the one who ultimately gets us to our happy ending.
Rating: 80%