Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura
Let's Get Out of This Country
[Merge; 2006]
Rating: 7.8

"I feel like getting confessional," Tracyanne Campbell sings on the title track of Camera Obscura's third LP. This comes as no surprise to those of us who got all moony and maudlin over the Glaswegian sextet's first two albums. In 2001, the group issued their debut, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, in perfect-storm conditions for comparisons to Belle & Sebastian. They even had formal connections: Stuart Murdoch produced the album's lead single, "Eighties Fan", and Richard Colburn had played drums in an earlier incarnation of the band. The similarities extended to the vocals, as well, with Tracyanne Campbell often sounding like a more charismatic Isobel Campbell (no relation). But while that record echoed so much lace-and-paisley B&S, in Camera Obscura, Tracyanne played the dominant Murdoch role; John Henderson her recessive yet crucial Isobel. That inversion made the two bands seem like mirror-images of each other, and it was easy to pretend that Tracyanne Campbell and Murdoch were each the silent interlocutors in the other's wry dialogues.

Camera Obscura's second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder, expanded the band's sonic palette to encompass the influence of Leonard Cohen ("Your Picture") and the Beach Boys ("A Sister's Social Agony"), but did little to allay the persistent comparisons to their forefathers. By no means does this make Camera Obscura the poor man's Belle & Sebastian-- to the contrary, by emerging at a time when B&S was moving away from intimate chamber pop toward more ambitious, less immediate fare, they fell neatly into the stylistic niche that their fellow Scottish band was gradually vacating. And Murdoch's take on heartbreak-- masculine, but tinged with the classically feminine values of empathy and spirituality-- seemed less emulated than complemented by Tracyanne Campbell's perspective, which was feminine, but tinged with the classically masculine values of coarseness and aggression. "I should be suspended from class/ I don't know my elbow from my ass," she sang to a skittish crush on "Suspended From Class".

One of Camera Obscura's finest attributes is consistency. There's hardly a dud to be found in their catalog, and their similarly styled songs distinguish themselves the old-fashioned way-- with memorable melodies and unique lyrics. Pleasantly, that ethos remains mostly unchanged on Let's Get Out of this Country; there are few subtle changes to the band's sound, and only one of them is more than cosmetic. With John Henderson's departure, lead vocal duties now rest entirely on Campbell, relieving the music of a measure of contrast. Campbell, however, has more than enough charm to fill the role herself, and so while Henderson's departure shifts the nature of the group, it isn't for the worse.

Let's Get Out of this Country also emphasizes a zaniness that was only hinted at on its slightly more reserved precursors. This is due in no small part to the fabulously schmaltzy Vegas-wedding organs that flash all over the record like blindingly white grins. You can find them short-circuiting the indefatigable bounce of lead single "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken"; trilling through the dreamy melt of "Tears for Affairs"; and dappling "The False Contender"'s melancholy sigh. Too much of it would have wrecked the album's delicate poise, but luckily, the group doesn't lean too heavily on it for melodic counterpoint, balancing it out with elegiac brass and moodier organ tones.

Campbell's lyrical focus here remains squarely on love and its ugly aftermath. But the real struggle in her songs isn't between men and women-- it's between emotional vulnerability and the stubborn will to retain emotional independence. This unresolved point of view conveys a sense that Campbell's specific personality is coming through the words unfiltered, especially on the soaring title track: "I drowned my sorrows and slept around," she sings, adding hastily and chastely, "When not in body at least in mind." "Lloyd" contains a familiar Campbell arc, one that moves from timidity ("You can stay a girl by holding a boy's hand") to hard-nosed pragmatism ("I've got my life of complication here to sort out/ I'll take myself to an east coast city and walk about") in less than four minutes of fancifully brisk pop.

On "Come Back Margaret", Campbell addresses the still-pined-for ex of her own still-pined-for ex with "tears in [her] eyes", but still acknowledges that she "likes the free days with no expectations." And on the weepy, twanging "Dory Previn", Campbell is "sick of the sight of [her] old lover", eventually concluding that it's "time I let my love for him die." No endless yearning for Campbell, but no defiant posturing either-- instead, she explores the vagaries of searching for the circuitous route between the two. Though they haven't changed much in the span of three terrific albums, Camera Obscura no longer recall Belle & Sebastian; they only sound like themselves.

-Brian Howe, June 05, 2006