#424: Los Campesinos!, "For Flotsam" (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7_u0DbW1Dw

As segues go, it's hard to resist going from 1980 and "Blame it all on VTR" to a 2013 song whose first verse begins "You say you are an old cassette that has gone and split its spool".

These aren't the opening words of Los Campesinos!'s "For Flotsam", quite. It starts just with softly ringing synthesizer and Gareth Campesinos’s twee-yet-vigorous alto singing what turns out to be its chorus: “Knees knocking and blood flowing, so/ I want you to know that I want to”. So it's not an *exact* segue: Gareth is romanticizing a female friend, not a pre-sentient machine. That's why Trevor Horn gets cool oversized sunglasses while Gareth gets stuck with the percussive legs.

The full (and lovely and shambling) seven-piece sound kicks in almost at once: monotone synth in a “choir” keypad setting, rhythm-first piano, thick guitar sounds, regular pulsing slow drumrolls. That chorus could be part of a massive hit; so could the verses’ theme, a longing for a female friend to be his girlfriend. Gareth is openly telling the friend how he feels: I approve, and I think millions of listeners could too, although it's against every TV show principle from Cheers's "will they or won't they?" to Aaron Sorkin's "stalking is adorable". If you haven't heard the song on the radio, well ... It might be for some of the other reasons I love the song.

“She says ‘If you’re unhappy, then you’ve gotta find the cure’./ Well, I prescribe me one more beer; beyond that I am unsure./ May not be be-all and end-all; in my defense, she is the whole./ I’ve thrown my goalkeeper forward; she’s catenaccio”. Catenaccio is a defense-first soccer formation; great metaphor, at least once it looked it up on Wikipedia. I love the way the register shifts between populism — “As I saw God in the bathroom, I baptized him in sick” — and prep school vocab — “embraced him in the cistern and said ‘C’est la mort! Enough of this'”.

I love too how even though his friend does not in fact want him that specific way, she can speak in terms reminiscent of You and Me Against the World or NIN’s We’re in This Together. “Later she said something that stuck hard in my mind: ‘We are their Capel Celyn, they’ve got to keep their slippers dry'”. Capel Celyn was a village flooded to make a dam for Liverpool factories; "For Flotsam" is gorgeous *and* hyper-enthusiastic *and* poetically inspired *and* teaches me random facts that Gareth thinks I should know. Los Campesinos! do well on critics' polls and indie blogs, too, and their concert tickets cost enough that I'd gulp and hesitate about seeing them if they came to town. Maybe it's not stardom, but it's nice to not be alone in enjoying this.