Camera Obscura – Look to the East, Look to the West (2024) [FLAC 24bit/48kHz]

Camera Obscura - Look to the East, Look to the West (2024) [FLAC 24bit/48kHz] Download

Look to the East, Look to the West, the new album by Camera Obscura, is a revelation. The Tracyanne Campbell-led outfit, reuniting with producer Jari Haapalainen (Let’s Get Out of This Country, My Maudlin Career), have crafted an album that simultaneously recalls why longtime fans have ferociously loved them for decades while also being their most sophisticated effort to date. It is also the most hard-fought album of Camera Obscura’s career. Following the 2015 passing of founding keyboardist and friend Carey Lander (to whom the penultimate track “Sugar Almond” is addressed), the band went into an extended hiatus. They remained in contact, but their status was uncertain until they announced their return, having been invited to perform as part of Belle & Sebastian’s 2019 Boaty Weekender cruise festival, along with a pair of sold-out warm-up shows in Glasgow. Donna Maciocia (keys and vocals) joined founding members Kenny McKeeve (guitar and vocals), Gavin Dunbar (bass), and Lee Thomson (drums and percussion) for those shows and has since become a regular songwriting partner of Campbell’s. Recorded in the same room where Queen wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Look to the East, Look to the West feels big, a widescreen reframing of Camera Obscura’s sound that, paradoxically, saw the band go back to basics there are no string or brass arrangements, with more emphasis placed on piano, synthesizers, Hammond organ, and drum machines, and, perhaps most strikingly, the group have dropped the veil of reverb that characterized their previous albums. The tinges of country and soul that give Camera Obscura’s baroque take on pop music its bittersweet edge have never been more apparent guitars shimmer into the distance, keys haunt, and Campbell’s voice searches for the heart, reflecting on love, loss, and the passage of time. Lead single “Big Love” relishes in the space between country rock and prog, a pining break-up anthem featuring the soaring pedal steel of Tim Davidson. It’s a Nashville Sound heartbreaker, tackling the complexity of wanting to rekindle a bad relationship with Campbell’s uncanny ability to render the past: “It was a big love, she said / That’s why it took ten years to get her out of her head,” she begins. “We’re Going to Make It in a Man’s World” was co-written with Maciocia for filmmaker Margaret Salmon’s 2021 film Icarus (After Amelia). (Salmon, in turn, shot Look to the East, Look to the West’s cover photography featuring Fiona Morrison, who was on the cover of Camera Obscura’s debut, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi.). Ironic and sincere, the two navigate the reality of being women in the music industry, somehow floating over Davidson’s pedal steel and Maciocia’s keys. “The Light Nights” is a swooning song propelled by a western shuffle and killer guitar, striking a balance between a particularly good honky-tonk joint’s jukebox and a lost gem of California pop music waiting to be discovered in a 7” bin. Look to the East, Look to the West is the sound of a band that has grown more confident in its sound and purpose than ever. It is Camera Obscura at their best and most evocative, an album that completely rearranges the listener’s emotional core, leaving them sad and exhilarated at the same time. Camera Obscura’s catalog is replete with songs people point to as life-changing, songs that will stick with them all their lives. Look to the East, Look to the West has 11 of them; take your pick.After an 11-year wait, the new album from Scottish twee-pop legends Camera Obscura feels like relief. Tracyanne Campbell’s voice is as balm-like as ever on “Baby Huey (Hard Times)”—a knowing reference to the tragic frontman of Chicago R&B heroes Baby Huey & the Babysitters; blessed with divine Beach Boys harmonies, it’s about how the band’s fans saved them after the 2015 death of longtime keyboardist Carey Lander. Wrestling to reconcile loss and hope is a running theme. “Liberty Print” leaps from easy-listening pleasantry to a sweet bop of twinkles and burbles and radiant laser-light synth from new member Donna Maciocia, who joined after Lander’s passing. Campbell wrote the song about the loss of her late brother, and it tracks both a troubled relationship (“Oh, he caused a scene on the ballroom floor/ Smashed my dream”) and grief (“Oh, what a terrible waste/ Of a young man’s time/ You never did find peace”). Campbell and Malciocia also teamed up for winsome “We’re Going to Make It In a Man’s World”; it’s a little bit country, a little ’60s girl-group naif—but then the lyrics sting like a bee: “The loss adjuster came to the door/ Accountability wants to know the score … Takе your report/ Shove it right down your throat.” Campbell has called it “a bit tongue-in-cheek with a serious message at its core. As middle-aged women in the music industry, are we relevant?” (Answer: More than ever.) Swoony waltz “Only a Dream” feels like a cut from a Mama Cass solo record. “The Light Nights” shuffles with Bakersfield brightness. “Denon” boasts summer-of-soul sunny guitar and keys, with Gavin Dunbar’s bouncy bass almost acting as a duet partner for Campbell. There’s a pair of heart-achingly beautiful piano ballads, “Sleepwalking” and “Sugar Almond”—the latter featuring an off-kilter music-box melody that suggests its tiny dancer is bent on the spring. “Pop Goes Pop” is Sundays-esque jangle-pop with sassy pedal steel, and that instrument (courtesy of Campbell’s life partner, Tim Davidson) also vivifies “Big Love.” Making twee honky-tonk a real thing, the song nods to Waylon Jennings and Sandy Denny, and it just shines. – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:

1-1. Camera Obscura – Liberty Print (05:14)
1-2. Camera Obscura – We’re Going to Make It in a Man’s World (04:17)
1-3. Camera Obscura – Big Love (02:57)
1-4. Camera Obscura – Only a Dream (04:24)
1-5. Camera Obscura – The Light Nights (04:33)
1-6. Camera Obscura – Sleepwalking (03:40)
1-7. Camera Obscura – Baby Huey (Hard Times) (03:21)
1-8. Camera Obscura – Denon (03:34)
1-9. Camera Obscura – Pop Goes Pop (04:33)
1-10. Camera Obscura – Sugar Almond (03:42)
1-11. Camera Obscura – Look to the East, Look to the West (04:26)

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