Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career

The breezy, blissful sounds of Camera Obscura’s new record ‘My Maudlin Career’ are perfectly suited to help usher in the Spring, where clothes get loose and a bit more suggestive, and the lonely hit the city in search for a potential Summertime romance. And from the sounds of things, singer Tracyanne Campbell will be right there with you, still looking for the right person to trust with her love. She remains surprisingly optimistic on this new batch of songs, especially when you consider how many times her heart’s been kicked around (if you were to believe her somewhat confessional lyrics). And when you can make such beautiful music as this when you’re heartbroken, here’s to her relationship search continuing on endlessly so listeners can get more sublime records like ‘My Maudlin Career’.

There is an intensity and passion underlying each song, but a listener can simply get swept away by the euphoric arrangements found throughout the album. The strings are absolutely majestic, guiding the melodies steadily along in order to reach the heights of Campbell’s angelic vocals. The album kicks off with ‘Frency Navy’, the lovely first single from the record. With lyrics about dusty libraries and dietary restrictions, it is assuredly an indubitably cheeky Camera Obscura song, smoothly taking a relationship from it’s joyful beginnings to the bitter end in three minutes flat.

‘The Sweetest Thing’ continues the love’s labor lost theme, complete with soulful backup vocals provided by Nicolai Dunger. The song also has revealing lyrics that shed some light on Campbell’s writing process: ‘You challenged me to write a love song / Here it is, I think I got it wrong / I focused on the negative / The pain was too much to write and sing.’ Anyone who has ever stared at a blank page trying to encapsulate the joy or sorrow that romance can stir up can relate to those lines. And therein lies the beauty of their songs, apart from the lush orchestration and 60’s style pop arrangements; the listener can easily identify with the characters introduced within these lyrics and the poignant situations they often find themselves in, no matter how intensely personal they may or may not be for Campbell. That speaks not only to the universality of her words but also to this tricky and all-to-familiar game of love.

‘Swans’ is apparently based on a riff the band has had bouncing around for years, and, according to Campbell, ‘I thought it was time we did something with it.’ And thankfully they finally did, for ‘Swans’ is the albums real standout. From it’s triumphant, soaring hook down to Campbell’s tongue-in-cheek delivery of caustic lyrics like ‘Oh you want to be a writer. Fantastic idea!’ It sounds like the national anthem of a sweet, broken-hearted country that only exists in the dark clouds of our failed relationships. It’s simply a wonderful song from an album filled with them.

There are many different stages to a relationship, and ‘My Maudlin Career’ has snapshots from each of them, taken shortly before Campbell burns the pictures entirely to get rid of the memories. It’s a wonderfully paced and produced record (with Jari Haapalainen again manning the boards with aplomb), and is certainly the realization of the promise of a band that has been heading in this glorious direction all along. The melodies are gorgeous even when the subject matter is not, and that stirring dichotomy provides an uneasy, tenuous balance to the record that feels completely natural and serene. Breaking up has indeed never sounded so good.