Los Campesinos! -- ROMANCE IS BORING

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Already listened a few times, children (was busy watching the Survivor finale, and therefore away from boards). Glad to see that people seem to be enjoying it as much as I am. Must say, it really feels vindicating to have been one of the earliest supporters of maybe the best band in the world since 2007. In my opinion, of course. Wonder when they'll finally fuck something up...?
 
Ha. I am not sure how that doesn't compute, but it's all good. I'm a big fan of sport and competition (just in general), so there you go. I pay at least as much attention to sports as to music. I also avoid casinos.
 
I also avoid casinos.

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/dalton
 
Your best joke in a while there, Laz.

I'm still working on the album. Just now got to "Straight in at 101" and heard a line about a cock. I don't think they're playing badminton though.
 
Shuttlecock and/or Lance's Mom.

"Heat Rash" probably reminds me of their previous work more than anything else so far. Still got a few tracks left, but my knee jerk reactions with these guys are reliable. So it's fairly safe to say that I'll probably wind up holding this album with as much or more affection as I do the previous two. But I'm noticing it's a little light on the female vocals. That makes me a sad bastard.
 
Thanks a lot, spoiler alert. That shout is one of my favorite moments in their catalog. Song is starting now.
 
When my friends and I are playing DJ Hero (or when we were, for a week), every time we could trigger the Euphoria button, we would scream, "JEWPHORIA!!!!" It was very, very, very satisfying.
 
Alright, so I'm done with the first listen. Definitely darker, like Laz said, and certainly showing a bit of maturation in both instrumentation and lyrical content. It's quite obviously a very good album, evident after just one listen. But it'll take a while before I can really give it the Lance's Mom treatment and, ahem, put my finger on it.
 
I'll probably reserve my judgments on the production until I hear lossless or the vinyl.
 
Fair play, that. I'll still stand by it, since I so greatly preferred the sound of the first LP, EP, and initial singles to Beauty vs. Doom, but we'll see. First few records and singles have all sounded better on CD, though. For the, ahem, record.
 
I'm not crazy about the drum machine breakdown in In Media Res. Still a great track, even if it's less inviting than the other two openers.
 
An honest question: how many people (who want to hear it, of course) have pre-ordered or have concrete plans to buy this record? Seriously. Not trying to stir up anything. Just curious.
 
I haven't preordered yet. It seems stupid for me to preorder from Insound and have to pay shipping when I can mosey on down to the record store the day of its release and get it for 10% off during vinyl happy hour. It's not like they're going to run out.

Either way, there is absolutely no doubt this will find a nice home in my septic tank milk crate next to its two brothers. Don't know if you've seen The Twitter, but Gareth is pretty dismayed at the leak. I don't know why. He should know it's inevitable, especially since it's well known that press copies are floating around.


On a related note, my copy of Hold on Now, Youngster perplexes me. I'm sure you have the vinyl too, Shouter, so maybe you can appreciate this. On the disc with the etching, I can't figure out why the C side (which only has "2007, the Year Punk Broke" doesn't sound right at 33 or 45 rpm. I don't get it. But it's on pretty orange vinyl, so I'll let it slide.
 
It is supposed to sound right at 45, I think...? I have to admit, it's been a while since I physically spun that LP. Mine did sound fine, though, back in the days of yore.

I don't have Twitter, but yes. I have heard of such things. As I have talked about (not sure if you read that TMT piece to which I linked, somewhere, but it's very good: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/The-Myth-of-DIY and http://www.tinymixtapes.com/2009-Fuck-Love-Let-s-Make-Dystopia for details), I think that being upset makes perfect sense. This is semantic, but I think "dismayed" is probably half of what I'd feel, if my (band's) record leaked. I'd also be fucking pissed off, too.

These days, it is indeed to be expected (even Weezy's record "leaked"...and that was because Amazon fucked up; same thing happened with the U2 record, which was also legally "leaked," on accident), but I think it'd still be brutally upsetting. The most infuriating thing would have to be how brazenly blogs and less-policed, public boards are willing to post it. That shit is crazy.

Falco's blog post after the most recent Future of the Left LP leaked is also good reading. A good glimpse into what it feels like for the artist, rather than the fan--be he/she brazen, guilty, conflicted, for some reason bitter, or just confused:

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

jim fork
It's difficult to express exactly what I felt when I found out, last
wednesday, that the album had made it's way onto the internet. 22nd
april - approximately eight and a half weeks before release and only
three since the fucking thing was mastered and whilst members of the
band don't have shiny little embossed copies there is a promotional cd
of the record on sale at ebay for twenty five quid.

I drank a bottle of Jamesons and began to lecture the cat on copyright
control. To her credit, she simply fell asleep as Law and Order went
about its business in the background.

Myself, Kelson and a couple of the guys at Beggars spent 72 hours or
so pissing around, sending angry emails to proud bloggers (and oh, the
fucking pride of the feckless thief) and, amongst others, a Russian
website that was already charging people for the songs. Motherfuckers.
I guess that since the bottom has fallen out of the arms trade, any
collection of notes, however obscure, is a legitimate income source.

So, anyway, the fucking thing has leaked despite our desperate
delaying tactics and you may have listened to it / be dowloading it
this second / have taken the position that you'd rather wait for the
actual release - regardless, it feels that getting annoyed about
downloading in this valueless modern age is like taking issue with
water for being wet or night for gradually turning into day because
ultimately the entitlement that most people feel for free music
completely overshadows any moral or legal issues and conflicts that
may arise in the hearts and minds of better people, people who
understand that actions, on both an individual and group level, have
consequences far beyond that moment of instant gratification.

There's so much to say with so little effect on this issue, so many
well-intentioned but wasted words devoted to it ... but anyway,
thankyou for downloading in barely a minute something that we poured a
year of our lives into, attempting (successfully, I believe) with a
great and furious pride to better our previous low-selling (and leaked
three months early) album, a record which flew under the radar for
many reasons but mostly because most of the goodwill poured on it
happened and had dwindled several months before it was available to
buy.

Yes, buy. Such a dirty fucking word. Currency exchanged for goods and
services. Food, Clothing, Butt-plugs and fucking H2O. How far, I
wonder does this entitlement for free music go? My guitars, should
they be free? Petrol to get us to shows? Perhaps I should come to an
arrangement with my landlord, through the musician-rent-waiver
programme.

Perhaps he should pay me, for his ninth-division indie-cred through association.

You will have to excuse me, people of the internet. It turns out that
I just wanted a big party with balloons and streamers to celebrate
everything we put into this thing, released into the physical world
with a fanfare and fuss befitting its status. I'm not angry (in fact I
don't blame you, unless you leaked it, in which case I WILL KILL YOU),
just a little worried that the record we made will get lost amongst
the debris and leave us playing shows like we just weathered at the
laughably bad Camden Crawl this last weekend - fifteen people and a
world of disillusion.*

Anyway - please be careful, or we'll get the world we all deserve.
Hobby bands who can tour once every few years if they're lucky, and
the superstars, freed from such inconvenient baggage as integrity and
conscience, running the corporate sponsored marathon of £80-a-ticket
arena tours and television adverts til their loveless hearts explode
in an orgy of oppressive branding and self-regard. Some of us, in all
honestly, just want to make the music we love and play it around the
world without living in poverty.

We'll be announcing some deal involving pre-orders of the cd/lp with
an immediate download in the next few days.

Do consult your surroundings before proceeding.

falco

*Next time somebody tells me that i can't drink my rider in the
building I'm playing in I'm going to fuck them with their own shoes.
 
I sort of used the word dismayed as a way to put it nicely, but I certainly understand why an artist would be so pissed about it. It's unfortunate that this is the norm now, but I think being prepared for the inevitable has to soften the blow a little bit.

Interesting read from the Futures of the Left guy. I do sympathize, even if my download habits don't indicate that.
 
You bet your ass I'll be buying the Los Camp!

And I also sympathize with what the guy above is saying. I do try to buy stuff if I like it, but to be honest it's usually a used copy, which I don't think really helps the band in any way financially either. In cases like LC I'll certainly get it new.

Of course, if you pay to see a show, that certainly helps.
 
An honest question: how many people (who want to hear it, of course) have pre-ordered or have concrete plans to buy this record? Seriously. Not trying to stir up anything. Just curious.

I intended to begin buying new releases I was interested in this year, but for a number of reasons I only bought a few. This year, I'm determined to do so, starting with LC!
 
I intended to begin buying new releases I was interested in this year, but for a number of reasons I only bought a few. This year, I'm determined to do so, starting with LC!

Part rant, part hypothesizing, part working class philosophizing, part confessional, all overly earnest:

Not at all picking on you, in particular, but it's this that often worries me, about leaks/illegal downloading. Just in general. In the past, I often promised myself, "Oh, of course I'll buy this, when I get the chance." Too often, though, I broke these promises. This was a particularly big problem when I was in Japan, since records were both $30 and freakishly expensive to ship back to the States. I've really made a lot of headway, though, and I'm about as proud as my wallet is upset--very--of how well I've done.

I'm also very curious about how this all plays out, in sales terms. I think that Falco raises a really important point, in that too often the good will and enthusiasm generated by a given record is totally exhausted, once people can actually buy the thing. I can remember this very thing happening, with Curses, their debut (which he mentions). Very often, the argument is made that a leak or even just general TRY FOR FREE HERE downloads drum up support and get people moving to shows, etc.. Is that true? Hard to say. Some people say it works, some that it doesn't; I've read interesting but deeply flawed/biased pieces on both sides of this debate.

The problem is that...I mean, what do we have? Like a 4 or 5 people accounted for who will very likely buy the thing? Think about how many people aren't that relatively responsible, in the uncharted wilds of the internet. How is it even a debate? If I take a CD from your house, I stole it. I can buy you a new one or later give you an equivalent cash payout, yeah, and I suppose that'll even us out...but I still stole the first one.

I dunno. As I get to know local label people better and better, not to mention watching my friends' bands constantly get squashed by fallout from the financial troubles of even the smaller, local labels (see Touch & Go and Kranky's recent struggles, for Chicago-centric examples of not-quite-small-but-still-hardly-major labels), it gets harder and harder for me to download something in print without wringing my hands. It's become a trickle-down recession. A cousin and ostensibly adopted brother of mine kept a diary on his band's last national tour, and it was brutal to read...scrounging for meals, never even breaking even (cuz the record was a bit cheaper/freer on either iTunes [money they never saw] or the internet), coasting in to town on fumes and (literally) at one point with shot brakes and no money for new pads, and sleeping on discarded mattresses behind Wal-Marts (when it was warm enough) or with four other people in a frigid van (when it wasn't warm enough).

I'm hoping that my relative levelheadedness and lack of invective keeps me from derision, here. Recent events, basically, have gotten me reconsidering all this leaking business; and very recent events have gotten me wanting to speak up in here. I mean, a U2 record...? Honestly, fuck them. They'll make $99,999,989.99, instead of $100,000,000. Who gives a shit? But when somebody's going cross-country or -ocean and paying the bills and incidentals with a LOT less income, $10 is dinner. I understand that I'm reputable and buy the music I like and that so are a great many others who dl shit illegally...but simply by taking part in that "system" or "culture" of illegal downloading is an act of complicity. What I or we may be doing is perhaps and arguably not as illegal as what others are doing, but those very arguments ("Yeah, I download it, but I'm going to buy it."), while well-intentioned, are in and of themselves a huge part of the problem, because they (I hope unintentionally) functionally work to lend credence to the general culture of illegal downloading, by association.

I say this because you can't make illegal downloading semi-legal, in the current landscape. This means that any "Yes, but..." arguments like the ones we often make ultimately support, by extension, the people who are straight up just in it to win it. It's all or nothing. I am starting to think that nothing might be the best way to go. Of course, that's greatly complicated by the ever-widening musical maps of the world, where literally countless recordings of significant interest to significant numbers are pressed in editions of, like, 30. I'm guessing, though, that that's generally more of a problem for me than for about 100% of the people who post on this particular board. I hope that doesn't sound preachy...hm. I'm not trying to absolve myself; rather, I'm saying that I do think that downloading has a place (of, namely, a musicological or musical historiographic sense), in that it can allow obscure, important, or even censored musics to live on.

I don't fucking know. I think too much, I guess. I wish I didn't, much of the time, but I do. It rarely works out. I have been reduced to posting on boards about records that I haven't actually even heard, just because people can get SOOOOOOOOO riled up, when they think that people are calling them criminals...which, in a way, they are...and because it's just easier to go with the flow. Discourse generally doesn't get into enough detail for somebody who's well-read to talk his/her way out of discussing a record. But whatever. Blah. Input? Please, keep the flame-throwers at bay. I feel I'm talking gibberish, at this point. Somebody wanna make some copypasta in another thread, go ahead. I'm spent. So to speak.
 
Tremendously well said. Good job, man.

It's probably high time I start trying to lead by example myself. I can't afford to go full Scumbo, but even if I stop downloading leaked records, maybe I'm making a sort of stride.
 
I still remember when Kid A and ATYCLB leaked, in 2000. And by "leaked," since I didn't yet have a stable internet connection or computer, I mean "went on sale at an indie shop, a week early." That shit was illicit and under-the-counter. Only for the people they knew. We were nervous and sometimes a bit guilty.

That was not even 10 years ago. How things have changed, no?
 
I say you only live once and there are way more important things to worry about than illegally downloading music. Fuck it. Just pull the trigger and don't look back.
 
How to Manhandle an Atomic Serve is actually the first leaked album I ever listened to. That's actually how I found this place. Someone had set up an account on Yahoo and given out the login and password to get in and download the eleven tracks individually. I didn't even have to register here to get the stuff I needed. Even that seems like a far cry from what we've got now. As soon as something pops up on what.cd (sometimes months ahead of time), I can have the entire thing ready to go in less than three minutes. It certainly takes away from the mystique, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Romance is Boring is a perfect example of that.

The biggest thing I'm noticing, and also the biggest problem I'm beginning to have, is how it indeed kills any positive buzz that could start circulating around the release date. Nothing could be worse for an artist for the hype to have totally dissipated before the album is even available to buy. I really hope that doesn't happen for this record.
 
I can't afford to go full Scumbo, but even if I stop downloading leaked records, maybe I'm making a sort of stride.

This is just the nearest quote, so it's easier. This isn't as representative as it should be. I think, though, that it's interesting to note the tone that these sorts of debates so, so, so often seem to have. u2pm gets an awful lot of (exaggerated for effect, yes; again, this isn't the BEST example) shit around here for what basically amounts to following the law and encouraging others to do so, and seems (to me) in large part to have curbed his anti-dl'ing posts. Perhaps to avoid the trouble?

On a lot of boards, this is what happens--wanton downloading, then scolding, then "FUCK OFF AND DIE I'M POOR YOU CUNT!" Again, I'm not talking about this post, and this forum isn't even remotely as intense as others. But while the degree may be different, the sentiment remains.

A few weeks ago, I called the police on some broke-ass dudes selling CD and DVD bootlegs, and my friends thought I was a fucking lunatic. The operator, or whatever, seemed to think I was wasting her time. We stuck around, in the general vicinity, and it didn't even look like the cops did anything other than say, "Hey, guys...clear out. Next time, we might ticket you." What the fuck is that? How does or did this happen? Why?

I think that u2pm has said it before--if I walked into a store and stole a record, I would have a court date. It's just so clear-cut, you know?

Ugh, this post isn't as coherent as I'd like. I'm too tired to care.
 
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