Written by: Dave Cantrell
Sophomore syndrome? What’s that? Underachievers Please Try Harder, Camera Obscura’s second album, this time self-produced with the help of Geoff Allen, pretty much dispenses with the notion of distinguishing one’s follow-up from one’s debut, returning to the giddy subtleties of Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi (reviewed here) with nary a break in stride, Tracyanne grabbing our smiling attention with the opener’s couplet ‘I should be suspended from class/I don’t know my elbow from my ass’ (“Suspended From Class”), the song dressed in the expected soft cottony fabrics and delicately pointed, slyly arch accents – the twinkling layers of agile acoustic picking, spry organ runs when needed, a humbly lofty trumpet showing up as a gallant escort at track’s end. Hearing their sound again, there’s a glow that welcomes us, and we it, as a fairly recently made old friend (UPTH showing up just under two years after BBH-F) comes round for an afternoon of sparkling wine and some deftly articulate conversation.
Again the arrangements bristle with a clean, intricate energy, appearing for all the world unfussy and unobtrusive when in fact they were most certainly fussed over and most certainly stand out even as they keep to the margins. It’s all about a busy subtlety with Camera Obscura, and if you don’t get that then you don’t get the band. Combined with unimpeachably witty-but-not-too lyrics (again with the subtlety), the result, once more, is utterly satisfying, the same kind of satisfying as waking up on a brilliant summer’s day with that innate sense of being alive and taking a great big deep breath of that mere and miraculous fact.
That said, there nonetheless come moments where the vaunted Camera Obscura elements don’t, in the end, gel into the sublime shape they’re meant to. “A Sisters Social Agony” never quite gets past the drag factor conferred upon it by the late 50’s/early 60’s pop ballad structure it’s built on and which it hopes to emulate, the carefully plinked vibe inserted for sonic authenticity only serving to underscore the song’s shortcomings.
Funny, then, that “Teenager” should come immediately along and, while mining a very similar motherlode era-wise, replete with a kind of Goffin-King classicism, it knocks it out with a pleasing ease, echo-plexed wooden percussive clacks and theremin-like background vocals working a treat. As does the walking country lope of “Before You Cry,” Gavin taking the lovesick lead vocal with the perfect mix of fuck-off vulnerability in his pitch. As always, though, it’s the many immaculate layers and how they’re produced – with an unassuming confidence – that win the song here, the soft-paletted harmonica bringing that late-afternoon winsomeness, Kenny McKeeve’s sadly perforated, clean-shaven guitar lines and of course the lapsteel cameo at the song’s back end that sounds like Ben Keith sneaked into the studio unannounced and plugged in just because he couldn’t resist.
After the Tindersticked anomaly of “Your Picture,” its Cohen-ness only working on the strength of its earnestness, we’re shuffled into the presence of “Number One Son,” wherein the half-caff coffee shop lope gets a string- and trumpet-laced adrenaline shot during the break that sends it racing on tiptoes to the end in a way that suggests there was a bit more jolt in that joe than first thought. So juiced, “Let Me Go Home” just goes ahead and starts on the finger-snapping dance tip and stays there, putting a slightly slighter and considerably more northern spin on Northern Soul, Gavin’s bass setting the Wrecking Crew foundation on which to lay his Motown fanclub vocal. It’s the Style Council we might actually have listened to, no po-face, no dogmatic stridency (and therefore a more honest homage), just a good-footed good time stomp that puts the blues-fueled Mod stamp back on blue-eyed soul.
But it must be said, if Underachievers.. is to be remembered for one song, it will be “Books Written For Girls,” a slow and prettily sad indictment of young men (one thinks ‘student,’ for some reason) priding themselves on being sensitive feminists (‘He likes to read books written for girls’) while modeling behavior redolent of his granddad’s day, transparent regardless of facade (we’ve all met them, haven’t we?). An odd choice for an album centerpiece but it is that, speaking as powerfully as any song in their career to the light/dark tensions inherent in Camera Obscura’s work. Tracyanne’s sweet girl voice going plaintive (not to mention containing her most heartbreakingly powerful lyric: ‘My door is swollen from the rain/God knows we’ll never see her face again’), the minor-chord piano and McKeeve’s pedal steel nearly stealing the song and taking it back to the Grand Ole Opry for a good cry. Beautiful, soft, biting, imperishable, which is Camera Obscura in four blendingly contrasted words.
It’s not often a young band manages consistency of this magnitude on its first two releases. To say that Underachievers Please Try Harder is a near seamless continuation of Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi is nothing but a compliment of the first water. Via its intricacies, via its intimacy, the music of Camera Obscura is vividly alive. Yes, it’s music that very gently washes over you, bathes you with melody and humanity and an understated (but no less moving) pathos. And, yes, it’s music that gives a sense of making your heart sigh. But as neither of those attributes, by my lights, are anything but sensations well worth experiencing, and in any case songcraft this exquisitely wrought is a joy simply in itself, I say check the word ‘twee’ at the door and come on in and join me. The pop is fine.
