Camera Obscura
My Maudlin Career

Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career

(4AD, 2009)

If John Peel adored (or used to adore) you. You played in the BBC Radio 1 Sessions alongside Led, Doors, Hendrix, Pink, and Joy Division, just fewer times than the thirty-two of The Fall. Then, John said "Teenage Kicks" is the best song ever, and he was right. Peel, "slowely," was a serious one.

If Ivo Russell-Watts wants you under the 4AD label. Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance record for his label, and he invented This Mortal Coil to have them sing cover versions of Tim Buckley and Big Star.

If you are commonly associated with the acoustically and chamber-like Pop of the "Belles and Sebastian-like" excellent Belle & Sebastian, and Stuart Murdoch himself ends up producing your debut album.

If even "there's something rotten in Denmark," if even there is something "rotten" in Johnny, if even "fresh fruit is mistaken for rotten vegetables," well, there is definitely something good in the Camera Obscura sextet, Scots from Glasgow, the creation of crystalline singer, dusty guitarist, retro singer-songwriter Tracyanne Campbell.

Their sound is Twee pop, a bubble-gummy subgenre of Indie pop. Creators of a predominantly Country Pop blend, voluminous, rich in nuance. Chamber Indie Pop, with string orchestrations and also brass, with rhythms close to Jazz, with some Motown influence. Epigones of Belle and Sebastian and, in part, of Stereolab, they worshiped/loved Van Morrison and internalized the most romantic songwriting of Paul Simon. Sentimental and sweet, yet with Raphael-esque grace. A taste for the past, flattering, placed like a seal on the arm and the heart. The audio itself is retro. Campbell's voice comes from afar. Distant. Antiquated. Almost from a gramophone. Yet that airy voice carries weight.

The name, Camera Obscura, en passant, more than paying homage to Nico, refers to the singular late nineteenth-century contraption with lenses and mirrors that projects the entire city of Edinburgh inside the Outlook Tower onto a horizontal ceiling. Thus their music, ethereal and tactile at the same time, feeds on projections, movement, and image games between quick dreams and lazy and idle daydreams. With lots of Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht is the keyword. And Romanticism. Yes. A search for something indefinite, a yearning to desire, and a disease of a painful longing. Novalis, Van Morrison, and Mickey Mouse's Minnie. This is Tracyanne. In the dark, the density of whispered words, murmuring to the moon. Always a bit towards the sacred and ineffable night.

Her voice is loaded with unripe melismas. Heartbreaking. Unfailingly. It tears, extracts languid sensations. Every song fits this elegant style, with uniformity (perhaps it's a limitation), with intensity (perhaps, at times, oppressive), with variety (in coherence, precisely, that needs to be attributed to it).

Carey Lander, the keyboardist, stands out in drawing the shadowy moods, the torments and incessant desires. Torrid and vaporous, in order. And in disorder. Unfortunately, she will die in 2015, at only 33, due to bone cancer, without giving up, until the end, on the exhausting live performances.

Lee Thompson's drumming is squared and always perfectly "squares the circle" of the compositions.

Among these, all indeed commendable, the utmost attention is deserved by the LP's incipit, "French Navy", their most beautiful and characteristic single. Not despite the senses, but through them, it immediately delivers something sublime. Not at all withered.

Then "Swans", ethereal, and "Careless Love", instead, "careless love" that certainly makes the singer suffer a lot, who, like a nightingale, dives onto a white rose.

"Away With Murder" swollen with veils and distances, travels between rarefaction and longing, where, apparently, it completes itself.

An intense lyrical imprint lies within simple dramatic-narrative forms. Campbell is a confidential writer who fights spleen with a certain wandering and rambling romanticism, with texts that align travels and broken hearts above all, matched and supported by pleasant melodies for ballads and uptempo songs.

The lush chamber (dark, obscure) Pop of "My Maudlin Career," which echoes "Out In The Country," from 2006, is certainly to be promoted (with at least 3.5 stars). It will prove sufficiently subliminal to influence at least your subsequent listening.

"What do you carry under the mantle

That with invisible force

Penetrates my soul?" (Novalis or Campbell)