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Album Reviews
Album Review: Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career (Beggars/4AD)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 20 April 2009
Three years after their last release, Glaswegian five-piece Camera Obscura delve into the shadowy side of their introspective, whimsical indie-pop. “It’s intense and quite dark,” frontwoman Tracyanne Campbell says of the new record, which was recorded in Sweden with producer Jari Haapalainen, also responsible for producing material for the likes of The Concretes and Ed Harcourt. She’s half right – though ‘My Maudlin Career’, while filled with doleful and at times joyless lyrics, has another side to its coin – sunshine, spritely melodies, and Tracyanne’s unmistakable, unrivalled sweet-sounding voice. ‘James’, a song that Tracyanne herself agrees is not typically Camera Obscura-esque, is ironically the album’s highlight: a gentle and sweeping torch song that manages to sound both atrociously depressing and beautifully mournful. ‘My Maudlin Career’ is interchangeable throughout, a kind of yin and yang record – dark and light, happy and sad. It doesn’t waver, though – there are no apologies, and for an album that seems to have covered a difficult break-up for its entire play, it doesn’t get tired or wet. A fine fourth release au fait with the tribulations of a heavy heart. TW
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