Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura
Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi
[Andmoresound; 2001; r: Merge; 2004]
Rating: 7.5

A few years before Underachievers Please Try Harder whispered its greeting to bookish girls and the boys who write sestinas about them, there was another Camera Obscura record. In those days, the wispy Glaswegian septet numbered merely six, and local boy-with--arab-strap-made-good Stuart Murdoch produced an early single ("Eighties Fan") and arranged strings for them but wasn't yet shooting their album covers.

Upon its release, U.S. listeners could only find this fine indie pop outing while exchanging shy glances in particularly well-stocked imports aisle. Thankfully, Merge has finally dusted off the group's UK breakthrough for American release, and although the record is narrower in scope than its follow-up-- which hopscotches from Leonard Cohen to The Supremes-- it still sparkles.

On their charmingly understated first date, Camera Obscura hew more closely to their contemporaries than their 1960s influences. Winsome, acoustic-driven songs such as "Swimming Pool" and "The Sun on His Back" fit comfortably alongside fellow bedsit pop acts like The Guild League, The Fairways, and of course, Belle & Sebastian. Tracyanne Campbell's stiff-lipped vocals even evoke those of The Softies' Rose Melberg, particularly on "Let's Go Bowling" (one of the reissue's two bonus tracks, along with "Shine Like a New Pin").

Here, Camera Obscura play their teen-romance cards close to their hope chests; the line between earnestness and artfulness is indeed thin. Like B&S's best (there I go again!), the sprightly "I Don't Do Crowds" could be an anthem for Victorian Lit majors-- or an ironic pleasure for disaffected hipsters just finding "I'm a Cuckoo" via its Avalanches remix. But more likely, it's both. Campbell, who shares vocal duties with John Henderson, adds to those delicious double layers on opener "Happy New Year", offering this one-of-a-kind couplet: "Did you know I could be a lot of fun?/ I'm aware that friendship can die young."

Elsewhere, "Double Feature" waxes precious about Catherine Deneuve and winter, and "Houseboat" takes an outsider's look at the fun lovin' found in Christine McVie-penned Fleetwood Mac. A dispute over Nancy Sinatra provides the chorus to "Anti-Western" ("I'm taking your boots off," Campbell retorts), and "Pen and Notebook" works in a winning Johnny Marr namedrop over halting piano, which is later joined by swirling orchestration that runs the risk of boring any chamber-pop Philistines still in the audience (their loss).

"Eighties Fan"-- the single that brought Camera Obscura to the notice of John Peel-- has a drum opening that could have played over the Lost in Translation credits. Because of its connection to Murdoch, it's the best-known of these early tracks but there are a half-dozen songs on Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi that are just as good. Very few of them, however, capture the band's songwriting strengths-- placing a modern lyrical twist on the 1960s arrangements of Bacharach, Webb, and Hazlewood-- as well as "Eighties Fan" does. Come to think of it, very few tracks on Underachievers do either.

-Marc Hogan, October 21, 2004