Camera Obscura has been perfecting its patented brand of bittersweet, lovelorn baroque pop over the course of four albums now. And after an almost four-year layoff, the band is back with Desire Lines (4AD), and it’s really rather lovely. Tracyanne Campbell talks of getting out of the band’s collective comfort zone by using a new producer, Tucker Martine (Spoon, R.E.M., My Morning Jacket), as opposed to Jari Haapalainen, who’d worked on its two last albums. But those fans suddenly fearing a startling left turn in the group’s sound can rest easy—there are no ill-advised forays into po-faced, chin-strokingly self-conscious experimentalism here. If anything, Desire Lines is a refinement, a lusher, perhaps more fully realized take on the perfect pop of Let’s Get Out Of This Country and My Maudlin Career. Camera Obscura—Campbell, Gavin Dunbar, Carey Lander, Kenny McKeeve and Lee Thomson—will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on them.
McKeeve: This place is all I think of whenever someone mentions Madrid. Perhaps I’m a glutton, but I dream, day and night, about this place. I’m the guy in Forrest Gump who never shuts up about shrimp. All it pretty much does is prawns and shrimp in garlic and oil with a little bread and some cheap and cheerful wine. Simple and delicious. I’ve been three or four times. Beautiful tiled walls, no seating but you don’t care; grumpy-looking old men in overalls cooking a century-old recipe. Worth getting a passport for.
