2010, Arts and Crafts

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If you come to Romance Is Boring with too many preconceptions about Los Campesinos!, please leave them at the door: this album may not be what you expect. Last year's mini-album We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed debuted a firmer, harder sound, the giddy sugar rush of "You! Me! Dancing!" metabolized into nervous adrenaline and lyrics spiked with jealousy, angst and paranoia. But Romance Is Boring feels like a band that's - well, not so much grown up - let's say "fully realized."

Recorded in two legs - at Carriage House, Connecticut where the Pixies produced and mixed Doolittle, and the then at Jason McGurr of Death Cab For Cutie's new studio in Seattle - it's a record that's bigger, deeper, more complex and more direct than anything Los Campesinos! has recorded to date. There are huge choruses ("There Are Listed Buildings") and squalling, Blood Brothers dissonance ("Plan A"), sheets of twinkling electronic ambience ("Coda: A Burn Scar In The Shape Of The Sooner State") and more great lyrics than you could ever hope to pin down in a press release.

Ask yourself this: how many indie bands make a second record that's better than their first, and then make a third record that's better than their second, all in little over eighteen months? Think about that one for a bit. Romance Is Boring is filled out with added brass, strings, drum machines and electronics, packed with guest spots from the likes of Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls and Jherek Bischoff of the Dead Science - it is nothing if not ambitious.