I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LOS CAMPESINOS!-Tiny Desk Concert #67 (July 5, 2010).

This Tiny Desk show really accentuates what fun can be had with the Tiny Desk format. Los Campesinos! are an eight piece band, but only four of them could come (or could fit, anyhow) in the tiny office.  And so we get a hugely stripped down set from the wonderful Welsh band.

One of the real benefits of these Tiny Desk shows is that it really highlights the songs themselves.  I enjoy Los Campesinos!, but sometimes I feel like their songs are so busy it’s not always easy to know exactly what’s going on.  This set shows how cool and interesting these three songs are underneath all the wild sounds and effects.

It’s also fascinating to watch these four folks perform in this room with nothing to hide behind.  The singer doesn’t even have a microphone, he’s just standing there with his arms behind his back singing to a small room.  And how odd it must be to sing to a dozen or strangers the a capella ending of “Straight in at 101.”

The three tracks all come from Romance is Boring and include the wonderfully titled: “A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me To Charlotte”, “Straight In At 101” and “The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future.”

As you might be able to guess from the titles, the band is wordy and articulate.  What you might not be able to guess is just how sexually explicit their lyrics are.  Not dirty (well, a little dirty) just unabashedly frank (and its made even more so in this quiet setting).

You can watch (and download here).

[READ: December 15, 2010] Echo #25 & #26

These next two books in the series are really fantastic.  Issue #25 brings the confrontation with Cain to a head.  It almost comes too quickly–there has been so much lead-up to it that when they finally meet the confrontation is (necessarily) brief and explosive.  They finally meet at the top of a mountain (where yet another really gruesome act is done to someone–although really it pales to what happened to the guy who was practically a skeleton).  The intensity of the confrontation, and the excitement of the denouement made me think that the series was just about to end.

But them comes Issue #26 in which the final panel changes the entire game!  I assumed that with the introduction of a hitherto unknown character that this meant the series was heading for a long run.  Of course, I knew that realistically it couldn’t go on for too long–it ‘s definitely not as open-ended as Starngers in Paradise.  But word is out that there are only 5 more issues of the series (not sure if #26 is part of the five).  So in a sense I’m glad he’s not belaboring the series just to have something to do.  But I will definitely be sad to see this series conclude (good heavens, I hope he has something new on the horizon!).

I can’t praise the series enough.  First of all, it is so very intelligent.  The theories that are being passed around are pretty mind-bending.  The only think I can’t decide is just how “real” some of this stuff is.  The science or at least the terminology behind the science seems so reasonable, that I feel like any day they’ll be revealing “Echo-strontium” or some such material.

Second, the art is superb.  Terry Moore is probably my favorite graphic artists alive today.  He draws people (especially women) who are real and incredibly expressive.  I’ve said before that his lines are so simple that if you compare the basic design of the women in Echo or even compare those characters to the characters in SiP, they’re not very different, and yet they are all distinctive.  It’s an amazing skill.

I like his artwork so much, I drew the cover of issue 26 for my Daily Doodle.