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.
Thomson: Samy Ben Redjeb trawls the African continent digging through crates of vinyl, so you don’t have to, although I couldn’t imagine who wouldn’t want to do this. Especially as the results yield such enthralling musical delights such as Orchestre Poly Rythmo De Cotonou from Benin in West Africa or Antoine Dougbé also from Benin. Great Afro-beat blog and reissue label releasing some of the best music I have ever heard in my life.
Video after the jump.
