My Maudlin Career
Camera Obscura made a huge artistic leap between their 2003 and 2006 albums. The former, Underachievers Please Try Harder rested comfortably on bandleader Tracyanne Campbell’s songwriting. Campbell possessed immaculate craft, but couched it in twee compositions that directly recalled Belle and Sebastian—which made them delightful, if easily forgettable. When Let’s Get Out of the Country arrived three years later, the band had fleshed out Campbell’s songs with sweeping baroque arrangements, girl group harmonies, and rhythms built for engagement slightly more strenuous than bobbing along in a beanbag chair. It was a watershed moment for Camera Obscura, their critical and commercial peak, with 3 singles charting in the UK. More importantly, the six-piece ensemble finally seemed invested in its own sound—as opposed to someone else’s, or a scene’s, or a genre’s. Campbell had some musical muscle behind her, and it appeared to inspire a new confidence in her singing and songwriting.
My Maudlin Career, this year’s follow-up to Let’s Get Out of the Country, does everything a follow-up to a career peak should. Camera Obscura throws itself completely behind its new aesthetic, for an album of spit-shined orchestral pop. The compositions on My Maudlin Career are absolutely unreal, especially for a band that, six years ago, seemed like it could only do one thing. The album’s title track, for example, finds one of Campbell’s richest, most rewarding melodies wrapped around a shambling piano fragment that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Four Tet track. The delicate piano line is held in place by a swooping string orchestration, and the song culminates with a big electric guitar solo. With those diverse stylistic touch points, “My Maudlin Career” could’ve easily come off as a disastrous mess; instead, it’s played with a grandiosity that makes it one of the album’s best tunes.
Running counter to the band’s bold production is Campbell’s songwriting, which has grown markedly deeper and more tangled. Her songs aren’t as immediately catchy as on Let’s Get Out of the Country, but her denser songwriting makes for a more rewarding experience. There’s something sinister lurking behind “The Sweetest Thing.” Ostensibly about how much Campbell likes her man, her affection is contingent on his sobriety. The ballads, which populate nearly half of the album, go for an even longer payoff; they’re songs that bide their time until they put the hooks in you—something Campbell would never have attempted even an album ago. My Maudlin Career revels in that maturity, backwards and forwards. On the title track, Campbell sings, “This maudlin career has come to an end/ I don’t want to be sad again.” With music as sumptuous and rich as this, she might just be able to pull that off.
-Martin Brown, 2009
Album of the year right here.
Posted by: Zebtron A. Rama | 2009.12.22 at 23:45