Marking the second single to be released ahead of Los Campesinos!’s sixth album, Sick Scenes (out in February 2017), ‘5 Flucloxacillin’ demonstrates an ostensibly energetic, uplifting attitude.
Opening with cheerful guitar and piano chords overlaid with the painfully catchy “wooo”-ing characteristic of pop songs for the last 30 years, the atmosphere at the beginning of this track seems oppositional to the ominous pharmacological title and, in some ways, it is.
The embarrassment associated with drugs treatments for mental health (which is the subject of the lyrics) contradicts the confident and melancholic-romantic attitudes that generally dominate contemporary pop music.
However as the experience of depression and anxiety is prolific today, instigated somewhat by pressures exerted by the aspect of an inherited society which has been forged by an older generation, ‘5 Flucloxacillin’ certainly fulfils criteria for popular music, in that it retains its relevance to broader society.
Whilst the message of the lyrics is concise and pertinent, the ridiculing comparison between older generations and impatient, incompetent cyclists maintains a light-hearted feeling in the face of common experience.