New Album Review
Album Title: Desire Lines
Artist: Camera Obscura
Date of Release: June 3, 2013
Genre: Alternative/Indie Rock
Gavin B.'s Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Okay I'll admit it... One of my biggest guilty musical pleasures is the bittersweet '60's influenced indie pop music of Camera Obscura. Camera Obscura hails from Glasgow Scotland and early in their career, they shared a lot of similarities with their close friends and big brother band, Belle and Sebastian. Their 2001 debut album
Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi was produced by Stuart Murdoch, the front man for Belle and Sebastian. But over the past ten years, as Camera Obscura vocalist and songwriter Traceyann Campbell has become a more confident and self assured artist, Camera Obscura is sounding less and less like Belle and Sebastian, while Belle and Sebastian is beginning to sound more and more like Camera Obscura.
Camera Obscura's early album covers expressed their fascination with Sixties era geek chic.
I own 12" vinyl editions of Camera Obscura's earliest eps and albums simply because of anesthetic quality of their cover art. Their album cover photos reveals their stylistic fetish for an early Sixties sensibility. Nearly all their songs underscore their love of Brill Building pop, Phil Spector girl groups and the Burt Bacharach. The band members all dress in a similarly fashionably unfashionable thrift store clothing making them all look like lovable geeks.
Early on John Peel noticed them and proclaimed Camera Obscura as one of the biggest up and coming bands on the British Isles. They were recorded for a Peel session but that album has yet to be released in the United States. Now 12 years and 5 albums later, Camera Obscura is finally beginning to live up to Peel's early praise.
Camera Obscura vocalist and songwriter Traceyann Campbell at the 2010 Coachella Music Festival
Desire Lines comes after a two year period in limbo in which the band put all touring and recording activities on hold because illnesses and personal problems of band members. The album isn't a big change in course for the band but yet another benchmark in the bands evolution toward producing increasingly cool and self assured pop music.
My favorite album track is
Troublemaker which has an element of synth pop with it's interlocking synthesizer lines and drum machine-like beats that meld with Campbell's sad-hearted harmonies and the more familiar Bacharachian percussion of previous albums. Embedded below is Camera Obscura's live performance Troublemaker before a noisy crowd at the SOhO club in Santa Barbara on June 16, 2013.
It's good to see Camera Obscura back out of the gate with a recording that is their most confident and consistent musical outing to date.