Sunday, June 14, 2009

The Essential is Invisible to the Eye…


Here's a hypothetical situation.

Let's pretend that in 1966, Phil Spector really did set the world on fire with Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High" and as a result in 1967 got carte blanche from an enterprising label…I'm thinking Warner Bros., eager to establish themselves and compete with Sgt. Pepper, to make an album his way. Spector calls on the Wrecking Crew and members of L.A.'s symphonies, of course, but then asks a fresh-off-of-Pet Sounds Brian Wilson to write the music and handle vocal arrangements. Wilson, wondering how to follow up his magnum opus, leaps at the chance to work with his hero. But Spector also knows that Pet Sounds was sort of a one-mood album. He wants tricks, variety, so for lyrics he enlists Carole King, in the midst of splitting with Gerry Goffin, to provide a little romance and plenty of pop sensibility, and pairs her with a poet newly arrived from Canada to record his own album, Leonard Cohen, who injects wordplay and more ambiguous, heartbroken emotion. Then for vocals, Spector obviously wants the Association and their distinctive blend...but he loves female singers and calls on the sweet-but-vulnerable-voiced new discovery of the Monterey Pop Festival, Laura Nyro, to front them.

Now say this wasn't a hypothetical situation and the aforementioned album actually existed. Well, it does, only it was recorded by Glasgow's Camera Obscura and released this April as My Maudlin Career.

Camera Obscura is guitarist/lead singer/songwriter Tracyanne Campbell, bassist Gavin Dunbar, pianist Carey Lander, guitarist Kenny McKeeve, and drummer Lee Thomson. My Maudlin Career was produced by Jari Happalainen and arranged by Bjorn Yttling. I wanted to mention all of this because these seven people have made one of those frighteningly rare things: a perfect musical statement which never drags or lessens for forty-six minutes and eleven songs.

I first heard My Maudlin Career as an in-store play at B&N, and felt compelled to snatch it up. Turns out it sounds even better when the speakers are right next to you, every percussion beat and violin slur and quiver in Campbell's gorgeous, gorgeous Scottish voice.

The music is usually bright and exuberant ("James" and "Other Towns and Cities" being notable exceptions) and always off-the-charts melodic, boosted by perfect musicianship (Lander's piano is divine, McKeeve's lead guitar sparkles, Dunbar offers a solid bedrock, and Thomson understands dynamics better than any drummer in recent memory) and Yttling's skill and Happalainen's well-mixed production. But Campbell's gifts as a composer are matched by a godly lyrical talent. For all the happiness in the sound, My Maudlin Career is a very, very depressing album, full of songs about heartbreak, getting dumped at the wrong time, being incompatible, drifting apart for no good reason, and yet (as the last two songs suggest) still holding on to love despite it all. It's a journey worthy of comparison to (very hushed whisper) Blood on the Tracks, the difference being Dylan was low-key, intimate, a Monet, while Camera Obscura is a Pollock or Rauschenberg, an explosion weighed with purity.

The opening "French Navy" is the best pop single of 2009. "Honey in the Sun," with its ultra-brash horns (thank you, Jesse Clemens for that word) and extended meters, ends it all on a surprisingly hopeful note. "The Sweetest Thing," "James," "Careless Love," the title track, the lyrics about going from Chicago to Cleveland…everything on this album is just too damn great.

Along with Sir Elton John's 2001 Songs From the West Coast, it's my album of the decade.

Please buy it instead of the Black-Eyed Peas. Please?

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