The Record Crate by Alex V. Cook – Los Campesinos!, Atlas Sound, England in 1819, top 5 Baton Rouge albums

If Los Campesinos! didn’t already have an exclamation point in their name, I’d put one anyway. They hit all my buttons with their new album Hello Sadness: elegant pop textures, hand-clapping kumbaya choruses and a plainspoken lovesick, sardonic point of view from frontman Gareth (the members all go by the surname Campesino, Spanish for “peasant”) and that’s all in the first song. Gareth raises his voice not just because he likes the sound of his own voice, but because the world is frustrating and won’t listen and you sometimes have to get in its face a little. Read more…