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  WEBB315DCD  £12.00

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  WEBB315CDLCD  £8.00

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  WEBB315LPLong Player  £15.00

Label

Wichita

Los Campesinos!

Hello Sadness

Written while reeling from the scorpion sting of heartbreak, Gareth Campesinos' lyrics to his band's fourth album are navel-gazing in the extreme. The Black Bird, The Dark Slope transmutes his sense of despair into the figure of a crow that "wants to rip me limb from limb"; the song's apogee of self-pity comes when he wails "so sad to be me". When not focusing on his navel, Gareth obsesses over the "two pools of mud" that are his eyes. He sustains a complex cartographic metaphor in Life Is a Long Time, in which his eyes' veins and wrinkles form a map of miseries; otherwise, his eyes are, like the rest of him, sad, sad, sad. But if Gareth is suffocated by woe, fellow frontman Tom doesn't indulge him with excessive sympathy: instead, his music ranges from the trumpet-embellished euphoria of By Your Hand to the choppy rhythms of Baby I Got the Death Rattle with impressive delicacy and unusual restraint.