From The Desk Of Camera Obscura: Roast Tomato Soup

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.

Dunbar:  Tomato soup is amazing. You probably know that already, but its proper quality gear, whether it’s tinned cream of tomato when you’re feeling poorly, or a slightly more sophisticated affair, like this rather cool roasted tomato. Easy to prepare and a really tasty and light soup. A kilogram of tomatoes, each cut in half. A large red onion cut into eight segments, two red peppers cut into strips, two-to-four cloves of garlic (depending on taste), drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sprinkle with two tablespoons of caster sugar and roast for an hour around 150 degrees Centigrade. Whip it out the oven and liquidize, add in 400 mls of vegetable stock and a dash of cream. Spot of sea salt and black pepper, and hey presto, one very tasty slow-roasted tomato soup.