Ian Gittins 

Camera Obscura

Koko, London
  
  


Camera Obscura have spent their decade-long career in the diffident shadow of Belle & Sebastian. Long-time protégés of their fellow Glaswegians, this unassuming sextet play a hugely similar strain of bookish, fey indie-pop defined by winsome guitar lines and literate ruminations on the pains of true love gone bad.

Like its two predecessors, their new album Let's Get Out Of This Country majors in delicious teen angst and sounds like a 1960s girl group working on a shoestring. The False Contender could be The Shangri-Las singing a minor work by The Shins and sounds lovely even buried in layers of Pontins-house-band-style woozy organ.

The band's focus is singer/songwriter Traceyanne Campbell, tonight sporting a sensible frock and bowl cut that Ann Widdecombe might reject as overly frumpy ("I know, I dress like a 75-year-old-woman," she agrees with a heckler). She's a gifted lyricist, particularly on new single Tears For Affairs, a maudlin reverie on the grief that accompanies adultery.

This is chaste music, trapped in permanent pre-adolescence, and it jars slightly that hefty guitarist Kenny McKeeve and bassist Gavin Dunbar look like they have wandered onstage from manning the door. Keep It Clean mirrors the music of their youth: the wry jangle-pop of early 1980s Postcard Records stalwarts Aztec Camera and Orange Juice.

The chiming Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken is an answer song to a 1984 album track, Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?, by fellow Glaswegian Lloyd Cole, while the St Etienne-like alt-country lament Dory Previn sounds similarly dated. It's a crippling irony: Camera Obscura play timeless music, but time has moved on.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*