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Look to the East, Look to the West, the new album by Camera Obscura, is a revelation. The Tracyanne Campbell-led outfit, reuniting with producer Jari Haapalainen (Lets Get Out of This Country, My Maudlin Career), have crafted an album that simultaneously recalls why longtime fans have ferociously loved them for decades while also being their most sophisticated effort to date. It is also the most hard-fought album of Camera Obscuras career. Following the 2015 passing of founding keyboardist and friend Carey Lander (to whom the penultimate track Sugar Almond is addressed), the band went into an extended hiatus. They remained in contact, but their status was uncertain until they announced their return, having been invited to perform as part of Belle s 2019 Boaty Weekender cruise festival, along with a pair of sold-out warm-up shows in Glasgow. Donna Maciocia (keys and vocals) joined founding members Kenny McKeeve (guitar and vocals), Gavin Dunbar (bass), and Lee Thomson (drums and percussion) for those shows and has since become a regular songwriting partner of Campbells. Recorded in the same room where Queen wrote Bohemian Rhapsody, Look to the East, Look to the West feels big, a widescreen reframing of Camera Obscuras sound that, paradoxically, saw the band go back to basicsthere are no string or brass arrangements, with more emphasis placed on piano, synthesizers, Hammond organ, and drum machines, and, perhaps most strikingly, the group have dropped the veil of reverb that characterized their previous albums. The tinges of country and soul that give Camera Obscuras baroque take on pop music its bittersweet edge have never been more apparentguitars shimmer into the distance, keys haunt, and Campbells voice searches for the heart, reflecting on love, loss, and the passage of time.Lead single Big Love relishes in the space between country rock and prog, a pining break-up anthem featuring the soaring pedal steel of Tim Davidson. Its a Nashville Sound heartbreaker, tackling the complexity of wanting to rekindle a bad relationship with Campbells uncanny ability to render the past: It was a big love, she said / Thats why it took ten years to get her out of her head, she begins.Were Going to Make It in a Mans World was co-written with Maciocia for filmmaker Margaret Salmons 2021 film Icarus (After Amelia). (Salmon, in turn, shot Look to the East, Look to the Wests cover photography featuring Fiona Morrison, who was on the cover of Camera Obscuras debut, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi.). Ironic and sincere, the two navigate the reality of being women in the music industry, somehow floating over Davidsons pedal steel and Maciocias keys. The Light Nights is a swooning song propelled by a western shuffle and killer guitar, striking a balance between a particularly good honky-tonk joints jukebox and a lost gem of California pop music waiting to be discovered in a 7-inch bin.
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