Los Camps! get down with Ponytail

By Liz Wagner
Collegian Editor
April 2, 2009

It’s always interesting to see how the British are received in Philadelphia. With the Fratellis last semester, the show was sold out at the Theatre of Living Arts, and the crowd was wild.

I was expecting a similarly raucous environment for the Los Campesinos! show on Sunday night. Maybe the band is still too obscure, or maybe it is a band affiliated with the quieter side of the British indie-pop scene. Whatever the case, on rolling into the TLA 45 minutes late that night, I couldn’t help but notice how empty the room was and how quiet the crowd seemed.

I crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t be the only person dancing that evening.

We arrived in time for the tail-end of Sky Larkin, whose front girl was a guitar-strapping Brit-rocker with nervous dance moves and a solid voice. The people scattered around the room seemed to enjoy her.

Next up was Baltimore-based Ponytail. Having only heard one Ponytail song prior to the show, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The band’s reputation preceded it as a nonsense band that made noise.

Ponytail is an amalgamation of sound. The tumbling drums, the racing, clashing guitars and front girl Molly Siegel’s incoherent, phonetic vocals and noises gave the whole set a jungle-y feel.

No one was happier in the TLA that night than Siegel. She doubled-up, rocking back and forth to her artsy, lyric-less music and broke into buoyant dancing whenever she started to sing, grinning her face off all the while. She bounced across the stage, completely confident in the gibberish and tongue trills she fed into the microphone.

Siegel yelped, cheered, screeched and howled into the crowd’s hearts. Shouts of “Ka-me-ha-me-ha” left me caught up in laughter and wiping tears of Dragonball Z nostalgia from my eyes. People who had clapped hesitantly during the first two songs cheered as guitarists Ken Seeno and Dustin Wong looked to each other to sway and hop in circles in unison as they played. Nobody really knew what was happening up there on stage, but man, did it sound fun.

The crowd had doubled in size by the time Los Campesinos! was ready to take the stage, but the TLA was still far from full.

There has yet to be a band that can match Los Camps! in musical style and lyrical composition. Naysayers may try to write these guys off as another snarky, indie British band with keyboards and pretty girls, but to do so is knocking the intricacies of what makes this band so enthralling. Part of its dynamic is made from the fact that they have two glockenspiels, two guitarists, a keyboard, an extra random drum and a violinist. The sheer depth of the band’s sound wouldn’t be complete without any of the seven members of the Los Camps!

Los Campesinos! kicked off with “Ways to Make it Through the Wall,” the opening track off its newest album We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. As singer Gareth Campesinos!’s (Yes, they have all taken up the Camps! surname) screamed out “and a room full of vacuum and a room full of air look the same” with an aggression not present on any album, listeners wondered if this was still the endearingly bitter Brit-pop kids they had been spinning at home.

Don’t worry, folks. Los Camps! is as adorable and cheeky as it sounds on the album and more. Quietly acidic lines murmured on the recorded tracks became publicly exclaimed as Gareth shouted himself hoarse about breakups and his ex’s new, literate and grammatically correct boyfriend.

B-side “International Tweexcore Underground” brought a pleasantly surprised shout from the audience, and keyboardist Aleksandra egged on the crowd as she yelled and mimed the count-up in “My Year in Lists” on her hands.

Gareth pounded away on the woodblock/drum/keyboard/percussion contraption set up in front of him, pausing between tracks to give the A-key on his glockenspiel to Aleksandra, whose own glock was lacking.

The band segued into ever-popular “You! Me! Dancing!” by pretending to play its cover of Pavement’s “Frontwards” from EP Sticking Fingers Into Sockets. The building, frenzied guitar intro grew and grew until even the most stationary, blazer-clad boy in the room was nodding his head in enjoyment.

The pace carried through “Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks” and encore “Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats.”

Anyone who wasn’t enamored with Los Campesinos! when entering the TLA that night certainly was when walking back out. There wasn’t a disappointed face to be found as the sidewalks filled with concert-goers, most with an added bounce in their gaits as they headed home to dream of noise bands and Brit-pop.

wagnere1@student.lasalle.edu