The ALBUM Section: May 2024
Digging into some of the month’s best new titles
There was a point where it appeared that 2013’s Desire Lines would be the final album from Glasgow’s Camera Obscura.
The band had been on hiatus since the 2015 death of keyboardist Carey Lander from osteosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of bone cancer.
It had been an ongoing battle, as Lander was first diagnosed in 2011. Desire Lines was written, recorded and released after, with shows played until Lander was no longer able. In the wake of her passing, there was no grand plan. It was a case of the members just not feeling up to making music together as Camera Obscura.
Artist: Camera Obscura
Album: Look to the East, Look to the West
Label: Merge Records
★★★★1/2 (4.5/5 stars)
For lead singer and songwriter Tracyanne Campbell, the loss was particularly acute in that she also lost one of her very best friends.
“I’m so proud that Carey has been part of my life, my weeks, my family’s day-to-day existence. I still can’t walk down the street without seeing her. She’s just going to have to live among us,” she wrote in a 2015 remembrance in the Guardian.
Campbell had other ways to be busy, to keep the grief from being too overwhelming. She had a young son at that point.
She also got back into the studio, recording with Danny Coughlan and releasing the lovely Tracyanne & Danny in 2018.
“It really helped me get my confidence back,” Campbell told Stereogum earlier this year. “If I hadn’t done that thing with Dan, I would never have made another Camera Obscura record. No way. It wouldn’t have happened.”
Camera Obscura’s members were all talking to each other during this time, but about their lives and not the band. That changed in 2019.
Belle & Sebastian was putting together one of those multi-day, multi-band cruises and asked if there was a possibility if Camera Obscura wanted to take part. There was a collective realization among the members that they were ready to play together again, but had been afraid to broach the subject in case one of the others felt it was too soon.
They played a couple of warmup shows for charity, donating proceeds to Sarcoma UK, the organization Lander had campaigned for in her final months.
The cruise experience at Boaty Weekender lit the spark. It wasn’t just that their performances were well-received or that they were experiencing the joy of playing together again. The ship was full of fans, not just from Scotland, but from seemingly all around the world. Camera Obscura got to feel how much they were loved and missed.
The pandemic put a crimp in the process, but Campbell had started writing more songs, even if no one was quite sure if they were still going to make another album.
“It was a big risk; it was actually quite scary to start having those conversations,” Campbell told the NME this year. “But I didn’t want to write songs in vain, for them to just be on a tape recorder on my phone with nobody listening to them. They needed a home, and the best home for them would be on a Camera Obscura record, because we’ve all been intertwined in each other’s lives for the past 30 years. Obviously, the experience of Carey’s death really had a massive impact on all of us. I feel like I had a sense of duty to allow those songs to live and breathe with those other members of the band.”
Camera Obscura eventually got in the studio to record Look to the East, Look to the West.
They decided to work with Jari Haapalainen, who’d produced their beloved Let’s Get Out of This Country and My Maudlin Career albums. His familiar, steady hand proved to be a good choice, as well as a reminder that after a decade, it was a continuation as much as a return.
The cover art makes that theme clear, using a new photo of Fiona Morrison, the same woman as on the cover of their 2001 debut, Biggest Bluest Hi Fi.
Campbell’s husband, Tim Davidson, was the one who suggested the band’s newest member. They needed a keyboardist and backing singer for those 2019 shows. Davidson, a music therapist, told Campbell that Donna Maciocia, who we’d worked with, would be a good fit personality and music-wise.
She hit it off well with everyone, so there was no doubt Camera Obscura knew who to continue with.
When the album was announced in January, the first song from it, “Big Love,” allayed concerns about how the band would sound after years away.
Bits of country music flavoring have made it into Camera Obscura’s repertoire over the years. Here, lap steel puts the toe-tapping song about lost love at, if not the Grand Ole Opry, at least somewhere on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.
Some of the album began as music for Icarus (After Amelia), a documentary about women’s labor by filmmaker Margaret Salmon. Images from the film stuck in Campbell’s mind, as she thought about her years in the music business and the existential questions she’d been asking herself during Camera Obscura’s hiatus.
“We’re Going to Make It in a Man’s World,” a co-write with Maciocia, puts tongue firmly in cheek to deal with the topic (“The loss adjuster came to the door/Accountability wants to know the score/The birds and the bees, they’ve been so sweet to me/Takе your report, shove it right down your throat”), the humor playing nicely off the band dipping into its lightly played classic pop bag.
The band’s always had a winsome quality, even in their saddest moments. It’s on full display on the moving “Liberty Print,” a portrait of grief over the passing of Campbell’s brother at the age of 34.
“Baby Huey (Hard Times)” dates back to songs Campbell wrote for Tracyanne & Danny. The love song, with its acoustic guitar and atmospheric synths, is a nice example of the generally more understated approach Camera Obscura employs on the album.
A love for old soul runs through “Denon”, but it sticks to emphasizing its guitar chords and keyboard backing rather than going fully percussive, a move that suits the mood of its lyrics about a lost friendship.
Likewise, “The Light Nights” might have given the full swoon treatment in the past, a la “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken.” But here, it’s aching guitar from Kenny McKeeve that carries the weight, perfectly conveying the lilting, yearning nature of the tune and its lyrics (“The light nights are lovely/But they make me feel restless, uneasy/Now I want to be sun-kissed/And put on your wish list immediately”).
McKeeve is the X-factor throughout. Check out his twangy, delayed tremolo cutting through the low-key after dark vibes of “Only a Dream.”
Maciocia’s ability to quickly fit in is apparent throughout as well, with her joyous piano and organ work making “Pop Goes Pop” even more winning.
Look to the East, Look to the West is at its most poignant when it’s most stripped down. With just vocals and piano, “Sleepwalking” conveys its sense of loss before the rest of the band appears in the final minute, a thematic show of support.
“Sugar Almond” is where Campbell writes most directly about Lander. She came up with it years ago, then kept it hidden because of how personal it is,writing another song for Lander, “Alabama,” for the Tracyanne & Danny album.
VIDEO: Camera Obscura “Big Love”
It wasn’t until a songwriting session with Maciocia that she felt comfortable enough to share it. The keyboardist came up with the piano arrangement to fit Campbell’s demo. The decision was made during recording to stick with that, rather than do a full band version, which emphasizes that sense of loss (“Hey, I liked who we were together/I’m not sure who I’ll be apart/I will love you forever and ever/You didn’t take much, you took a piece of my heart”).
The closing title track plays like a song over a movie’s end credits, conveying a sense of inviting warmth after all the emotions that preceded it. It gives the sense that, after everything, that they’re okay and that, whatever the listener’s been through over the last nine years, they can be, too.
By all accounts, Lander didn’t want her death to mean the end of Camera Obscura. Taking the needed time to grieve on their terms, the band sounds as good as it ever has.
Campbell remains in fine fettle as singer and songwriter, with the band chemistry still intact.
Look to the East, Look to the West may be more subdued, but everything that’s worked about Camera Obscura remains in fine form. It’s as consistent as anything they’ve done and a most welcoming return.
Death plays a completely different and tragic role with To All Trains, the sixth album from Shellac.
Guitarist Steve Albini passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack, just days before the album’s release.
Thus, this isn’t a final album from an artist who knew they were dying, like David Bowie’s Blackstar or Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker.
Artist: Shellac
Album: To All Trains
Label: Touch and Go Records
★★★★1/2 (4.5/5 stars)
This was a return for the trio of bassist Bob Weston, drummer Todd Trainor and Albini, their sixth album and first in ten years.
The band had always played and recorded on its own schedule, as it was not the primary thing for the members. Weston and Albini had busy day jobs as recording engineers while Trainor is a drum instructor.
But Shellac never felt too far away, even during its breaks. They’d set the template with their stellar 1994 debut, At Action Park. With their established interplay, it was just a matter of coming up with the new songs when they were ready.
The irony of the band referring to themselves as a “minimalist rock trio” is that they often delivered a maximum amount of fury and sound. Such is the case with Too All Trains, where its ten songs clock in at under 29 minutes.
Trainor attacks the drums like a kid annoying his parents with his first kit, only with a lot more precision.
Weston’s bass doesn’t just work in tandem with Trainor’s drumming. At times, it wrestles with Albini’s metallic guitar. At others it takes the lead.
Albini didn’t so much sing as he shouted and intoned words that could be dark, funny or both.
“Scabby The Rat” takes its name from the inflatable rat that appears outside places using non-union employees when workers are on strike or locked out. It’s a tribute to Rob Warmowski, another Chicago musician and engineer who passed away in 2019.
Albini referred to Warmowski thusly: “The music scene feels like a family, and Rob was always the gregarious uncle who knew all the cousins’ names and would make introductions and start conversations so everyone felt at home.”
The lyrics are both irreverent (“Scabby the Rat makes the whole room pregnant”) and lovingly acknowledging what he meant to those who knew him (“Scabby the Rat/That means he’s immortal”). Trainor’s high hat and Albini and Weston’s punchy playing before each shouted “Scabby the Rat!” give it heft.
“Chick New Wave” rages like prime Minutemen, its lyrics could be taken literally or as satire.
There’s a groove to “Scrappers,” which is about people who collect scrap metal and re-sellable items out of the alleys and back streets of Chicago, ending with Albini and Weston repeatedly yelling “We’ll be pirates!” over and over with a certain amount of glee.
“Wednesday” sounds ready to fall apart in its shifting tempos, with Albini’s tuneless singing. Then the band tightens and Albini turns narrator as the lyrics get darker.
There are little turns and twists along the way, like how the band, on a dime, ends “WSOD” with noisy, straightforward riffage in a way that doesn’t happen anywhere else on the album.
“Days Are Dogs” opens with a feint. There’s a cowbell and the drum into suggests the pending arrival of a classic rock song that never comes. Instead, Albinii delivers lines both angry (“I’d rather have had syphilis and gout/Than leave you suffering an incensated out”) and witty (“My wives and concubines are all fecund and pulchritudinous/And I hope that that’s correct, the way I used ”pulchritudinous'”) as if Girls Against Boys had fished out a thesaurus.
Weston sings “How I Wrote How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’ (cock & bull)” in a flat deadpan that suggests both poking fun at Mark E. Smith as well as a loving hat tip. The late leader of the Fall wasn’t averse to taking shots at Albini, who during a Reddit AMA 12 years ago, said of him, “Never met him but I think he’s a genius. Top rants.”
The final song, the lurching, stomping “I Don’t Fear Hell,” makes for a fine, unplanned last word. Albini humorously notes that he doesn’t fear hell because “the floor show would be incredible” and “their baseball team is undefeated.”
He wraps it up with his last words on record: “Something something something when this is over/I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover/If there’s a heaven, I hope they’re having fun/Cause if there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone.”
It’s here that a story needs to be told. Over a decade ago, John Grabski knew he had terminal cancer. He basically had two options. He could get life-extending treatment that would have side effects that robbed him of his energy. Or he could live out his remaining days, less time, but with a more normal existence under the circumstances.
Grabski took the latter approach, asking Albini to record an album about what he was going through.
Along with his brother Benjamin Grabski and with Albini at the board, they made The Strain, an album under the moniker Teeth. It was a painful and brutally honest collection of songs. John planned immediately to do another album, with it half-finished, the cancer weakened him to the point where he couldn’t continue.
Albini later recalled Grabski, going through everything, being asked what he was thinking about on a particular day. His response wasn’t about what he or his family and friends would be losing. Rather, it was one word — “Tomorrow.”
After Grabski passed, Albini, in a remembrance, wrote these words: “The way John faced his mortality was inspirational. When my time comes, I hope I can follow his example. I hope when I die I go like John, embroiled in the middle of things, surrounded by people I love, doing the things that matter most. I hope I leave a mountain of shit unfinished, that I have a pan on the stove, a phone call waiting and a pencil in my hand. I hope I’m man enough to be thinking about tomorrow.”
To All Trains shows Albini was doing exactly that. It’s a fitting final statement for him as an artist and a terrific final bow for Shellac, going out with an album as strong as any they did.
QUICK HITS
Mdou Moctar
Funeral For Justice (Matador)
Politically astute and passionate and possessing massive guitar hero skills, Moctar is in top form. The band’s interplay is fantastic, the songs high-caliber. As good as its predecessor, 2021’s Afrique Victime was, this one tops it, the best of his career so far.
Score: ★★★★3/4 (4.75/5 stars)
Billie Eilish
Hit Me Hard and Soft (Warner Brothers)
Eilish’s third album smooths out some of the edges of her prior work, opting to go poppier. If it lacks the high points of her prior work, there’s still plenty to like here – the unabashedly catchy and queer “Lunch,” the quieter “Wildflower” and the light-as-a-feather “Bittersuite.” It’s a real grower, although one hopes Eilish and Finneas don’t apply the Auto-Tune with a trowel, as they do partway through “L’amour de ma vie” ever again.
Score: ★★★3/4 (3.75/5 stars)
Kate Hudson
Glorious (Hail Mary/Virgin)
Let’s get this out of the way first. Hudson can, in fact, sing. She’s in no danger of going on any future Golden Throats compilations. Working primarily with producers Danny Fujikawa (her fiancé ) and Linda Perry (a woman of many hits), Hudson capably runs through 12 tracks that call to mind pop rock of 25 years ago. They bring to mind the type of material that the likes of Sheryl Crow turned into hits. If it’s not going to sniff the charts in 2024, it’s a charming, likable throwback that sounds like an old CD that’s held up better than you remember.
Score: ★★★3/4 (3.75/5 stars)
Girl and Girl
Call a Doctor (Sub Pop)
This is a front runner for the most influences to spot on an album so far this year. This Australian band tackles all sorts of post-punk and sounds that were staples on Eighties college radio with energy and craft. The only problem? A little of singer and writer Kai James’ vocal vibrato goes a long way and there’s a lot of it.
Score: ★★★3/4 (3.75/5 stars)
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