camera obscura: my maudlin career (2009)

Camera Obscura
My Maudlin Career ••••½
4AD

Camera Obscura frontwoman Tracyanne Campbell deserves a medal. According to her, she provides not lyrics to latest album My Maudlin Career, but “documentation of what was going on with me for a while”. If that is the case, it has been a frantic, painful few years since 2006’s Let’s Get Out Of This Country; trust Campbell and Camera Obscura, however, to set all this turmoil to a backdrop of sunny pop with echoes of surf rock. It’s both dark and sugary sweet, making for an album that is immensely satisfying and well rounded.

Now signed to legendary label 4AD and well established after being championed by the late John Peel, Camera Obscura have no doubt felt a certain burden expectation in the making of My Maudlin Career. But it really doesn’t show. The tongue-in-cheek reference to the proto-feminist novel by Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (probably more widely known in its 1979 film version) gives a certain idea of the laidback, scathingly self-aware humour on display. My Brilliant Career is, after all, considered proto-feminist insofar as its protagonist chooses a career in writing over love and marriage. Campbell, on the other hand, knows that she just can’t help falling in love. On opener ‘French Navy’, apparently an homage to Al Green, she sings: “Relationships are something I used to do / convince me they are better for me and you”.

‘The Sweetest Thing’ keeps up that beautiful 1950s sound and shows why Camera Obscura are sometimes compared with Belle & Sebastian. Truth is, though, they are ballsier and far more wickedly funny than their fellow Scots. The lyrics here are particularly pleasing: “When you’re lucid you’re the sweetest thing / I would trade my mother to hear you sing”. Likewise, ‘James’ is an accurate and acutely observed song about the fallout of a relationship and the impossibility of being friends with former lovers.

Elsewhere, the title track is a dreamy, spaced out travelogue that leaves the listener with a heavy head (”You kissed me on the forehead / yeah, these kisses give me concussion”), while ‘Other Towns & Cities’ is something of a minor wonder, and a perfect showcase for the warm, lazy delivery that Campbell is famous for. It’s a classic drinking song. It’s left to closing song ‘Honey In The Sun’ to sum up My Maudlin Career perfectly: it’s breezy and clever, insists that you do some silly dancing in your bedroom, and is packed full of depressing lyrics: “I wish my heart was as cold as the morning dew / but it’s warm as saxophones and honey in the sun for you.”

As an album, My Maudlin Career has a delicately light touch. It’s full of pleasure and warmth and is perfectly constructed. It feels like it is over in a few seconds and leaves you wanting to listen more and more – essentially the perfect pop formula. Buy it, love it: come October you’ll be listening to it longingly, remembering the summer that was.

Scott Sinclair
UK release date: 20/04/09; www.myspace.com/cameraobscuraband

 

‘French Navy’

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCFZqmo11N8]

Written by: Scott Sinclair

Tags: camera obscura, my maudlin career

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.