Morose Glasgow-based six-piece Camera Obscura has shaken off their funk to produce a third album they’re excited to say you can actually dance to. It’s been several months since they released their recent Let’s Get Out of this Country, but its 50s-flavoured, Motown-influenced tunes-a breath of fresh air after the darker moods of past efforts-only get more charming with repeated listening.
Recorded with producer Jari Happalainen (The Concretes, Ed Harcourt), the disc’s ten tracks draw on the classic sounds of The Supremes, Lloyd Cole and Angelo Badalamenti, as filtered through the band’s own melodic sensibility. The lead single, “Hey, Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken,” has been a particular breakthrough-it’s a delightful sliver of brass-inflected pop panache highlighted by singer Tracyanne Campbell’s sweetly sombre vocals.
We caught up with keyboardist Carey Lander during a stop on the band’s current lengthy North American tour to talk songwriting, visiting our fair shores, and the nagging shadow of that other Glaswegian group.
The Varsity: With six people in the band, how does the songwriting process work?
Carey Lander: Basically Tracyanne is the main songwriter-she comes up with the melody and the words and some basic chords, and together we try to find the structure and decide how we want the song to come out. And then we write our own parts. Of course there’s lots of people to please, to make sure we’re all happy with the end result. I don’t think we ever argue too much, but it’s definitely good to have different influences and ideas.
V: Tell us a bit about making this record.
C.L.: This was the first album we’ve made with a producer, so it was different for us. And it was also the first time we’ve been able to record an album all in one go, not spread out over a year. So we went to Sweden and recorded about 14 songs in 10 days, which was hard but great. Very intense.
V: Do you feel like your sound has changed on this album?
C.L.: It is a change, but it was what we always wanted to do all along but weren’t capable of yet. The first albums weren’t really ‘produced’ at all, so this was a chance to make it sound really good. [Happalainen] knows what music we’re influenced by, and that’s reflected in the way he made the album sound.
V: The songs have this marvelous contrast-really downcast lyrics set to sunny-sounding melodies. Was that juxtaposition a deliberate thing?
C.L.: I don’t think we ever decided to make the album sound a particular way, but we were quite relieved that we’d managed to write some songs that people could dance to at last! (laughs) Maybe the pressure’s off for the next album-we can write a really miserable one.
V: You’re doing a fair bit of touring on this side of the pond-do you feel like there’s more of a push to ‘break’ the band in the North American market this time around?
C.L.: We’ve always been really happy with the response we’ve had in North America. We first came over about three years ago, and there were people at the shows and lots of support from college radio. It keeps getting better-it’s amazing to come back and play some of these places for the third or fourth time, and people still want to see you. That must mean that they actually like you. Hard to believe that, but it must be true! (laughs) We’re playing some places we haven’t been to before on this tour, which is the unknown-it’s good, but also scary.
V: You guys have played Toronto before-any thoughts?
C.L.: That was the first night of our tour last time. We were a bit jetlagged, but Toronto crowds are always amazing. I’m looking forward to playing the Opera House-it’ll be nice to play a different place this time.
V: Do you ever get tired of the endless comparisons to Belle and Sebastian?
C.L.: A bit. I mean, it’s understandable, and every band from Glasgow gets compared to them at some point in some way, and it’s probably true that there are some similarities between us. I think it comes down to shared influences-we both love a lot of the same music, and you can see that in what we do. But we’re making quite different music from each other these days.
Camera Obscura play the Opera House Jan. 31. Sold out.
