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Artist:
Camera Obscura
Title:
My Maudlin Career (CD)
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Our second favorite Scottish twee-poppers return to the formula that culminated in their 2006 break through, Let’s Get Out of This Country. Collaborating again with Swedish producer Jari Haapalainen (Peter, Bjorn & John, The Concretes), lead singer Tracyanne Campbell and crew deliver another set of sugar-coated retro hooks and Spector-texture that remind you why we fall in love in the first place, even when it usually results -- for Campbell’s characters, anyway -- in disappointment or disaster. These love-sick/love-hungry sentiments could easily become saccharine in less-assured hands, but Campbell spins her tangled relationships into love-song gold here by buffeting most everything in soaring string harmonies, girl group harmonies, ringing guitars, and trumpet blasts, while offering up confessions in her most confident singing voice yet. Beneath layers of jangling guitars and swooning synths punctuated with glock chimes, “Swans” swings like it just leapt out of a late-50s soda-shop. Fanfare horns drive the aptly named “Honey In the Sun” into prime top-down summer pop territory, and “Forests & Sands” adds a perfectly natural countrypolitan twang to the proceedings. Throughout, love buffets Campbell around like a leaf in the wind. After the love interest on “James” ends their relationship, Campbell laments, “I got scared by just how hard I fell/Oh, James, you broke me, I thought I knew you well.” By the next song, “Careless Love,” it’s Campbell delivering the coup de grace: “I blow hot and cold, I'm like a yo-yo/So I don't think I should see you again” as the strings swoop in to lament a different pain this time -- guilt. So when Campbell sings over a deluge of keys on the magnificent title track that her “maudlin career has come to an end/I don’t want to be sad again,” we know it’s a nice sentiment, but extremely unlikely. And thank the orchestrated heavens for that.
