AMG Review of Sticking Fingers into Sockets

Stewart Mason
All Music Guide

"When you play pass the parcel with human body parts/Somebody might get head, but someone will get hurt." Any debut EP that starts out with a couplet like that is immediately worth checking out, and Los Campesinos!' Sticking Fingers into Sockets more than lives up to its promise. That opening track, "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives," is a blur of wordy verses broken up by a sweet-and-sour choral chorus that sounds like the Polyphonic Spree on a Broken Social Scene-style atmospheric downer. In fact, this seven-piece British band is signed to BSS' Arts and Crafts label and this EP was produced by that band's sonic mastermind, David Newfeld, which accounts for the extremely familiar medium-fi miasma of various unexpected instrumental touches and the occasional use of amplifier buzz and tape hiss as musical elements. Fundamentally, however, Los Campesinos! are considerably perkier and poppier than their Canadian mentors: plaintive, tuneful indie pop/rockers like "Don't Tell Me to Do the Math(s)" and the brilliantly shambling "Frontwards" (like if vintage Talulah Gosh had a guest violinist) are more instantly hooky than anything Broken Social Scene have ever attempted, more along the lines of Guillemots or even an artsier version of the Arctic Monkeys. The EP's only real flaw is that at six songs in around 15 minutes, it's just way too short. More please.