On the Welsh band’s third album, Los Campesinos! give two misdirections for first impressions. While titled Romance Is Boring, the group proves romance is anything but. It’s panoramic in scope but sharp in focus: lead vocalist Gareth Campesinos! — a Ramones-style last name shared by the band’s members — explores love and relationships through an abundance of angles, penning vignettes ranging from dire to ridiculous. 

 

Nothing is off-limits for the singer; whether it be the unrequited love of a lesbian (I've been playing ‘straight chicken’ with gay girls, it's never enough,”) or settling down in Malta with his partner to become the national hero of their football team ("Pound every coin deep into the ground / Burn every note in circulation / There's a new face on the currency of our nation,") his lyricism is sharp at every ambitious turn it takes. Depending on the song, secondary vocalist Aleks Campesinos! alternates between Gareth’s straight-(wo)man, the voice of his romantic interest, and the thoughts behind his erratic word-vomit. The interplay of the two provides depth to these stories that would be impossible without her as his foil.

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The second misdirection comes in the album’s opening line: “Let’s talk about you for a minute.” In reality, Gareth spends little time addressing the “you” in these songs. The lyrics are diaristic — at best, they’re disarmingly humorous, self-aware, and sweet; at worst, they’re pathetic, self-pitying, and wrongfully righteous. But in his movement along this spectrum, he never fails to surprise in beauty or creativity. His turns of phrase reflect his admiration for Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, while his vivid descriptions, sexual frustration, and biblical allusions indebt him to Morrissey in an alternate universe where Moz’s obsession with Shakespeare is replaced by Gareth’s football fanaticism.

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His lyrics often take center stage, but he would be little more than a product of his confessionary predecessors without the backing of his eight-piece band. Outside the standard fare of rock band instruments — guitars, drums, bass, and keyboards — the liner notes credit glockenspiel, violin, piccolo, upright bass, trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, saxophone, and flute. In addition, nine vocalists provide their support on the album, highlighted by contributions from experimental pop contemporaries such as Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu), Zac Pennington (Parenthetical Girls), and Jherek Bischoff (The Dead Science). 

 

Though a U-Haul’s worth of instruments and a chamber choir of vocalists were staples of their first two albums, they were previously labeled as twee-pop. Despite the classification they were unhappy with — one that carries a stigma of simplicity and lack of instrument-playing proficiency — their music was always head-turning and critically praised due to its maximalist nature, uncharacteristic and even contradictory of the genre. 

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On Romance, they owe just as much to the dissonance of Sonic Youth and Dischord Records as the indie-pop of Beat Happening and K Records. They never shed the sugary melodies, but this go-round, every saccharine note is drenched in static. The once-bright guitar tones become speaker-blowingly overdriven; even the violins manage to sound menacing in spots. The symphony of assorted instruments loosens and contracts to amplify the lyrical content in a grandiose way.

 

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Opening track “In Media Res” begins with an anecdote of a lover, one that proves to be a former one in the subsequent verse. Gareth hyperbolically laments about his heartbreak, singing, “Drag my corpse through the airport and lay me limp on the left wing / Drop me at the highest point and trace a line around the dent I leave in the ground / That'll be the initial of the one you'll marry now I'm not around.” But the melodrama savvily sets up the question he poses in the song’s closing lines, one that frames the following 14 tracks philosophically. “If you were given the option of dying painlessly, in peace at forty-five / But with a lover at your side, after a full and happy life / Is this something that would interest you?” could be taken morosely, but with the horns and bells that back it, the inquiry seems optimistic. Ignoring the melancholy described in other parts of the song, it seems this is a prospect Gareth might be interested in. With the song’s conclusion, he asks both himself and the audience what value they assign love in their lives.

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Gareth gives himself the rest of a forty-eight minute full length to figure it out. His disillusionment with relationships is recurring, but portrayed playfully in many of the album’s high points. His humor shines on the title track, “Romance Is Boring,” using the same imagery of the ocean that becomes the center motif of the rest of the album. “We are two ships that pass in the night / You and I, we are nothing alike / I am a pleasure cruise, you are gone out to trawl / Return nets empty, nothing at all,” strikes the same point of relationship cynicism in previous track “There Are Listed Buildings,” but rather than using the tides to show his learned helplessness like in “Buildings,” “Romance” uses ships to compare the stark differences between him and his subject. The track also provides one of the catchiest choruses on the album, a foot-stomping group chant of “You're pouting in your sleep, I'm waking, still yawning / We're proving to each other that romance is boring.”

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And though the boring side of romance is shown early in the tracklisting, he quickly sifts through a variety of situations. “Straight In At 101” ends with an a cappella monologue: “I phone my friends and family to gather 'round the television / The talking heads count down the most heart-wrenching breakups of all time / Imagine the great sense of waste, the indignity, the embarrassment / When not a single one of that whole century was mine.” In a collection of narratives usually based on neurotic tendencies, it’s a moment of self-awareness that shows his impressive ability to skew the magnitude of his heartbreak.

 

Gareth relies on self-deprecation and eye-rolling facetiousness in most of the songs, but on “The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future,” he actually does, grimly and morbidly, “talk about you for a minute.” The subject of the song struggles with drug addiction and eating disorders; she asks the narrator, “One day to leave her, sand up to her shoulders / Waiting for the tide / To drag her to the ocean, to another sea's shore." Its arrangement snugly fits its mood, beginning with plucked guitars and an emotional string section that climaxes with the chorus. In a single moment, the band’s full range of instruments crashes into a cacophony behind one of Gareth’s most powerful melodies anchoring it.

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The album’s emotional core comes in its centerpiece, “I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know.”. Aleks’ refrain of “Please just let me be the one that / Keeps track of the moles on your back,” sounds like a heart-fluttering plea out of context. Gareth proceeds to prove otherwise in a five-minute temper tantrum directed at the subject of his affection, one who happens to have a boyfriend. His words pivot between straightforwardly spiteful (“Sometimes it's just enough to know I keep him on his toes”) and cringingly self-pitying (“He gave a gift of the Faber Book of Love Poems / Annotated the ones he thought applied the most / Not gonna win you 'round with prose / If anyone should know then it's I should know”). The audience never feels sorry for him, and they aren’t supposed to — he makes himself the antagonist on this track more than any other. 

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The instrumentation of “I Just Sighed” flips from quiet to crushing, always in perfect symmetry with the vocalists. It builds until the song feels like it’s going off the rails only to be reined in, but falls over the edge in the track’s closing lines: “Prettier now that you've grown your hair long / I'm a slip of a man since I cut mine all off / Please just let me be the one to keep track / Of the freckles and the moles on your back.” It’s the record’s noisiest and most masterfully produced, a testament to producer John Goodmanson’s ability to manage dozens of tracks in matching the manic passion of the vocals. The alignment of these two elements make the album not only the group’s best to date, but something unique and impossible to recreate. 

 

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The main character in Romance brings to mind Rob Fleming, the main character of Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity. Gareth and Hornby craft intriguing and entertaining stories with clever, but markedly terrible, protagonists. There are cracks of self-awareness, but they don’t realize just how shitty they make themselves sound. The skill of the authors comes in how it’s left to the audience to decide their opinions of their characters. It’s quickly discovered these are highly unreliable narrators — the pity felt for them rarely matches the pity they feel for themselves. The women they pursue are often the real victims in these scenes.

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But the characters are complex. They’re misguided, self-sabotaging, and unknowingly bratty, but also painfully human. Everyone has regrets, and relationships provide a breeding ground for them. The amount of deft wordplay and poignant observations of the protagonists make the content interesting, but it can’t make you sympathize with them. On the contrary, it usually makes you resent them. But these authors’ genius comes in how you can relate to and commiserate with their characters. Hell, despite their narcissism, you even like them sometimes. You want for them to change, and certain moments on the record give hope that they can. Human longing for another is not reserved for saints; Paul was a Pharisee before he was an apostle.

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On the album’s closer, “Coda: A Burn Scar In The Shape Of The Sooner State,” Gareth exchanges his verbose yelps for restraintful singing to create the most impactful moment on the album. Contrasting a novel’s worth of words and literary anthology’s number of short stories that the full length presents, the refrain, “I can’t believe I chose the mountains every time you chose the sea,” reframes the narrator’s perspective on his load of romantic misadventures. The rest of the group joins in his chant, recited over and over until fizzling into static and cutting off. 

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Gareth’s parting gift shows what could be a revelation. It pains him to say, but he knows he’s his own worst enemy. Instead of blaming his luck, he realizes his heartbreak is the sum of his own actions. Gareth may have made the right choice for himself; his use of the ocean throughout the album makes it feel like he never learned to swim. But in pursuit of another, choices must be made with someone else in mind. 

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This conclusion frames the album like a good movie. It leaves the audience to question if the protagonist made the right choice or not, if he needed the mountains or simply wanted it. It leaves us feeling as if Gareth made the wrong choice, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. The fact that the album led to this question shows what he intended to all along — that romance is far from boring.