Los Campesinos!: Romance Is Boring (2LP, anniversary repress, indie exclusive) [ARTS & CRAFTS]

Why you'll love it

An indie exclusive anniversary repress of Romance Is Boring as a 2LP set. It's the record where the Cardiff band brought in strings and brass for the first time, with "There Are Listed Buildings" and "The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future" as its singles.

This edition

• Anniversary repress
• Indie exclusive
• 2LP set, fifteen tracks over four sides

About the album

Los Campesinos! started out as a gang of Cardiff University students with glockenspiels and a fondness for very long song titles. By their third album they wanted something bigger. They recorded Romance Is Boring in early 2009 with producer John Goodmanson in Stamford and Seattle, and for the first time added strings and horns to the racket, building something dense, loud and gloriously overstuffed.

Gareth Paisey narrates it in three acts, writing (in his words) about the body, lost love, breakdowns and football, which is about as complete a picture of young adulthood as anyone has managed. The hooks are huge, from the title track to "Plan A" and "Straight in at 101", and the critics agreed: it turned up on the year-end lists at DIY and The Line of Best Fit. Four of its songs were reworked later that year for the All's Well That Ends EP.

Pitchfork later named the band among the 200 most important artists of its first 25 years. Not bad for a group whose song titles regularly need their own postcode.

Tracklist

Listen

On Arts & Crafts, a repress of the 2010 album.