As 2013 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.
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: There’s a great shot in John Huston’s 1957 war film Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison of Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum hiding in a jungle, stuck on a Pacific island during World War II; he’s a marine and she’s a nun. Mitchum, with very little change in his facial expression informs Kerr, and us, that a Japanese ship is approaching; danger is imminent. Any other actor would have erupted into a series of facial contortions and exaggerated body moves. Mitchum hardly moves at all at this point. That pretty much sums him up, the original hipster actor.
Video after the jump.
