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4Scotland may be the land that gave us deep-fried Mars Bars, haggis and Ally McCoist, but at least they tend to make up for it with gorgeous, kooky low-fi pop music, from Bell and Sebastian through Mull Historical Society and Teenage Fanclub. Unfortunately, Glasgow’s Camera Obscura belong firmly in the artery-clogging, undistinguishable meat, crap football pundit category. Having been around since 1996, you’d have thought by now that any group worth their salt would realise that jingle-jangle twee-pop needs to be offset by intelligent and articulate songwriting that engaging the brain, not just involuntary foot tapping. Unfortunately ‘Let’s Get Out of This Country,’ the group’s first since 2003’s 'Underachievers Please Try Harder' does neither.
Produced in Sweden by Jari Haapalainen, behind The Concrete’s lush wall of sound Camera Obscura strive valiantly to sound as inoffensive and cheerful as possible, while dropping in enough songs about the disintegration of relationships to keep them ‘edgy’. There’s something about Scotland’s dreary weather that seems to have a gloriously contrary effect on the country’s musical output. Not the rain-soaked gloaming for our friends north of the border – tunefully, it’s all is sunshine, picnics and girls in short skirts, with lyrics celebrating the darker side of love, loss and sex. And while ‘Let’s Get Out Of This Country’ manfully attempts to recreate this faux-jollity, the cheap production, horrible synthesizers and winsome vocals from singer-songwriter Tracy Anne Campbell means this only just about holds its head above water in the Loch.
And, although the music is merely unimaginative and hackneyed, the lyrics are absolutely atrocious, as if they’d been written in a foreign language and run through one of those dodgy translation software things we all used for GCSE French. Gems like “I was had love but soon had enough/ He was a false contender/ He must have been so thin there must have been a deep sorrow gnawing away at him” (‘The False Contender’ – and yes, it just about scans on record) and “Let’s get out of this country/ I’ll admit I’m bored with me” (the eponymous title track) would sound like bad schoolgirl poetry on a debut album, but for a band that’s been around for 10 years it’s just downright inexcusable. There are a couple of highlights. Single ‘Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken’ is a loving slab of summery pop, with just the right amount of darkness at it’s heart to prevent it sounding sickening, and ‘I Need all The Friends I Can Get’ has a neat lyrical turn of phrase that drags it head and shoulders above most of the rest of the album. However, it’s too little, too late, and Campbell propensity for repeating the same phrase over and over again ad infinitum throughout a song will drive even the most navel gazer to despair before the blessed end of track 10.
Yes, there are people out there who will like this. If the soundtrack to your summer is ‘The Boy With the Arab Strap’ then crack out the vegan BBQ and stick Camera Obscura on the stereo (not too loudly though). If you fancy a bit of meat to your holidays though, steer well clear.
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