Camping have done it again. With their two previous LPs. the band from Granollers (small Catalan town just outside Barcelona) left no doubt about their capacity to reinvent themselves. Leaving behind their post rock beginnings and moving towards a more vanguardist approach to rock, with their third LP, “Politics of Love” they have turned the rock format upside down and inside out and developed a Post Everything sound, hypnotically hard at times (“Cosmic Justice” – 7 minutes of primitive noise in search of a melody), dense and difficult at others (“Politics of Love (Inside a Washing Machine)”, claustrophobic and exhausting). From the beginning with the opening salvo of “Clues and Traces” Camping demonstrate their complete domination of a a perfectly calibrated sonic arsenal, which they use with grace and precision to suck in the listener, until the final track, “Delusions”, where the samplers introduce a kind of respite.


The constant search for innovation in development and structure within their unique conception of rock lead Xavi Font (vocals, bass, keyboards), Josep Arnan (bass and percussion), Oscar Cortes (guitars, keyboards), Juan José “Nitu” (guitars) and Toni Campoy (drums) to record with top Spanish producer Santi Garcia. The end result, “Politics of Love”, is their most radical album to date, combining spiraling repetition in crescendo, agonizingly hypnotic beats and mutating rhythms (see “Equidistant Satellites” for a fine example).


If Camping continue to win the respect of press and public alike it is because they show themselves to be as free as ever. “Politics Of Love” explores the abyss where love and hate mix and finds itself half way between rage and passion.