Los Campesinos! Are Back to Reek Havoc: Buzz Cut (VIDEO)
With their latest single “By Your Hand” out now, Los Campesinos! is back with a bang, and ready to release their fourth LP, Hello Sadness, due out in November. The Welsh septet formed in Cardiff, UK (though none of them are actually Welsh) back in 2006, and, with their first three records, charmed us with a dark approach to upbeat music.
Images of blood and razorblades are frequent in the bands’ lyrics, but it’s all cleverly woven around a bright sound in a way that adds an awesome weight and passion to the whole thing.
Their newest jam “By Your Hand” also manages to use this same schtick. The track starts with some dinky keyboard lines before the song revs up straight into the course. “By your hand is the only end I foresee,” shouts Gareth Campesinos! (the band all adopted the moniker for last names), stating his unavoidable demise. Just from this one line, you can already get a sense that this might have been a line thought up by Shakespeare, if the iconic English poet and playwright was in his 20s, and was just your run-of-the-mill urban youth up on the indie scene.
The video for the latest single articulates the song’s attitude perfectly. Always a split screen, close-up images of the band performing are accompanied at first with shots of retro-looking toys. But the images get more grim and raw, finally spilling beyond the divide in the screen as Gareth begins to wrap a plastic bag around his head and fill it with smoke. From there it’s chaos, as everything on screen is either smashed or on fire, resulting in a truly awesome musical clip.
You can see all the mayhem in the video below, and be sure to download “By Your Hand” for free from SoundCloud.
