Camera Obscura / My Maudlin Career

Two common knocks against Camera Obscura are that their music doesn’t reinvent the wheel and that the band itself is nothing more than a female-fronted Belle & Sebastian clone. Considering the former I must say that it is hardly a bad thing that there are more well-crafted and emotionally resonant songs in the world. The latter opinion, however, would only be salient if it were 1997.

The comparison is as unavoidable as it is lazy. Stuart Murdoch produced Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, they are both from Glasgow, and they both have the same musical touchstones – of course they sound similar. Never mind that by now Camera Obscura have been a functioning band longer than Belle & Sebastian or that they have grown consistently more engaging with each successive album (something only fanatical B&S fans would claim about that band). My own pet theory as to why this comparison still exists is that Tracyanne Campbell seems like a character in one of Stuart Murdoch’s songs. How could she not be? She's a challenging, literate woman who writes poison-penned love songs. (‘So you want to be a writer – fantastic idea’ from “Swans” is particularly withering.) If her name fit better in to an AABB rhyme scheme she may have already joined Judy, Jane, Sukie, Mary Jo and the rest in the Belle & Sebastian back catalog. ‘French Navy’ even seems to bait that trap with it’s opening lyric, ‘Spent a week in a dusty library’.

My Maudlin Career finds the band in full bloom, capitalizing on the momentum they gained from Let’s Get Out Of This Country. The progress incremental though, since this is merely a refinement of the band’s sound rather than a reinvention of it. The lone exception is Campbell’s revelatory vocal performance. Expressive, complex, and almost impossibly pretty, her voice has becomes the band’s most potent instrument. Bathed in reverb and perfectly matched to her wry, melancholy lyrics it can be gossamer light as in the ethereal "Other Towns & Cities" and yet strong enough to anchor the candied "Careless Love".

And boy does "Careless Love" need it. By the time it reaches the climax the strings have become so effervescent that they threaten to lift the song into the troposphere. Camera Obscura have finally gone Technicolor with their arrangements, as practically every song on the record is bursting with Wall of Sound-like production. Personally I wished they had taken the plunge and made a stripped down country record as Let’s Get Out Of This Country threatened to do - but to each his own. They aren't done with the Nashville sound altogether, as demonstrated in the cow poking, palm muted "You Told A Lie", the pedal steel sorrow of "Forests & Sands" and the myriad of C&W filigrees that pop up from song to song. No mere affectation, Camera Obscura have internalized the country sensibility so it blends utterly with their pop pursuits (in other words, this is no "Not Fair"). But these are merely pieces of the whole since girl group harmonies and clean cut chords are the order of the day on My Maudlin Career. "Swans" in particular begins a rubber band riff so poppy that Mark Barkan would be proud of writing it. Tracks like "The Sweetest Thing" and "My Maudlin Career" show off a profound love for and deep understanding of the glossy sounds of The Crystals and the Ronettes but marry it to something more emotionally intricate. Again, it's Campbell's voice that connects the dots throughout - smooth and sharp as a knife and can cut just the same.

The connective quality of her voice is needed especially since the album deals with, and partakes in, wild mood swings. A young couple's romance hasn't even begun by the first verse of "French Navy" and is long over by the second. The suicidal "Away With Murder" leaps right into the bubblegummy "Swans". The rudderless "Other Towns & Cities" (which sees Campbell wandering around her memories with naught but a bottle of whiskey and a guitar) segues into the record's most jubilant cut, the horn-powered "Honey in the Sun". Though it must be said that the record's happiest moment has her nursing a broken heart by wishing that it "was as cold as the morning dew". The upside (!) is that her heart is not frozen, if only towards the person who broke it in the first place.

Wishing to be free of feeling but unable to let go is a theme that is touched on repeatedly throughout the album ('If the blood pumping through my veins would freeze, like a river in Toronto I'd be pleased', 'This maudlin career has come to an end, I don't want to be sad again') and it serves as an interesting progression in Camera Obscura's work. This is a band that primarily writes love songs, but they are never songs about being in love, you know, supposedly best part of the whole cycle. No, they write songs concerning people who are about to fall in love, about to fall out of love, and dealing with the messy aftermath. They seem to be most at home with the slightly sickly feeling of anticipation for the good, the bad, and whatever is next. Before My Maudlin Career they were comfortable in that place, but here they want to leave it behind for better or worse. Previously Campbell was ready to be heartbroken but now maybe she is not so sure. That is progress.