Song of the Day: "The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future" -- Los Campesinos!

How do you know when a song is truly great, when it's more than just catchy enough to stay with you or more than just pretty okay or pretty solid but really and truly great? I discovered Los Campesinos! last summer, when I took a road trip to Lollapalooza with two friends. On Saturday of the festival, I think, we somehow ended up sitting on the grass by the sound stage, no doubt waiting to get good spots for another band, as Los Campesinos! played their show. It was very solid, the kind of thing that you overhear and draws you from sitting kinda far back to standing, jumping and yelling as close to the stage as you can get. Energetic is a little bit of an understatement; it's like if the Arcade Fire drank a Red Bull and vodka right before the show and decided to give this whole excitable indie pop thing a try. Whatever it was, it was good enough for me to check out when I left Chicago, and I was not disappointed with what I heard.

Flash forward to late September of last year. I was reading Pitchfork off and on and happened to notice a rare familiar name in their "best new music" section: Los Campesinos! and their newest single "The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future", released to promote their upcoming album "Romance is Boring". Pitchfork raved about the track (relatively, at least; they gave it an 8.0 which qualifies as a "rave" for them. The track review can be found here) and I hurriedly downloaded it from LC!'s website.

The result staggered me. Gone were the hyperactive indie poppers and their cute little keyboard-glockenspiel hooks. In their place was a mature, somber and intelligent band, singing about, as Pitchfork very nicely put it, "a too thin girl who'll kick your ass at Mortal Kombat", death, grey and somehow retaining a sense of their pseudo-trademark naiive hope. It is, frankly, a phenomenal song, one of my top 5 ever. I love it to the point that I wonder in amazement at the circumstances that led me to see LC! at Lollapalooza, when I just as easily could have missed them entirely in favor of another stage, another band, another festival altogether.

That's how you know a song is truly great, at least on a personal level: you contemplate the impact it would have had on your life had you never heard it, you thank god that you found the band in the first place and you wonder if other people's lives are empty and unfulfilling because they haven't heard the song. I know, I'm going a bit overboard but it's all true to a degree and regardless of whether you think this particular song is as completely fantastic as I obviously do, I refuse to believe that there can be people out there who do not like this song, or would not if they heard it. Listen to it. Now.

Also take a look at the rest of their stuff. "Romance is Boring", the album "The Sea is" comes from, is very solid, although it took me some time to get into. Look at "There Are Listed Buildings", "In Medias Res" and "We've Got Your Back (Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #2)". From their earlier albums, try "Miserabilia", "You! Me! Dancing!" and "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed."

and all you can hear is the sound of your own heart