My Maudlin Career
Camera Obscura perform a retro-twee pop that skirts between ‘60s girl-group homage and the skittering rhythms of fellow Scotsmen Belle and Sebastian, always with a sense of melancholy nagging our protagonist. Singer Tracyanne Campbell’s heart is always being broken and even when it’s not, her psyche is thrown off kilter by its manic swoon. The ensemble specializes in a blurry film noir where the sun breaks through the clouds just long enough to remind you that a storm is always brewing. “You Told a Lie” slows to reverb-ed strings and a dream-laced melody that channels the works of Lee Hazlewood and Serge Gainsbourg. “French Navy” captures the group at their most ebullient. “James” is a tour de force ballad brilliantly capturing the sorrow of a busted but somehow unrequited relationship. “Swans” swings with an optimistic Byrdsian folk-rock jangle amongst the reverb. The title track builds a Phil Spectorian wall of sound. “Other Towns and Cities” sounds as if someone threw Campbell down a deep dark well, which is where her emotions lead her anyway.
Latest from these Glaswegian indie-poppers blends 1950s beach music, country, and bubbly orch-pop to complement their alternately romantic and cynical lyrics.
The fourth album by Glasgow’s Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career, doesn’t exactly live up to its title, but it isn’t terribly cheerful, either. When Tracyanne Campbell (who often sounds remarkably like Jenny Lewis) sings “I don’t want to be sad again” on the title track, fans can be forgiven for asking when she plans…
Too late, Lloyd, they've been heartbroken now. The Glaswegian sextet's fourth album finds them if anything even more exquisitely melancholic than ever.
Few bands can imbue a line like, “You make me go ‘oooh’ with the things that you do,” with...
If Camera Obscura's jump from Merge (and Elefant) to 4AD had you worried, or if you had a nagging suspicion that the switch was some kind of cynical career move and that they might change from being a small band with a knack for creating small moments of transcendent beauty and emotion to bland major-label-styled product (not that 4AD is any more "major label" than Merge in 2009, but they do seem more like big business somehow), well, you can relax now.
<p>This album feels like a breakthrough, more polished and poised, writes <strong>Gareth Grundy</strong></p>
My Maudlin Career is the musical equivalent of a bowling alley chock-full of orderly, milkshake-drinking youth.
Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career review: When you're lucid you're the sweetest thing / I would give my mother to hear you sing