The climbing piano notes of Camera Obscura’s “My Maudlin
Career,” from the identically named album of 2009, did quite a bit to prepare
the world for the band’s public re-emergence after the very successful Let’s Get Out of This Country album three
years before.
The band released this new song a few weeks before the
album itself. Piano rang forth from a
minor cacophony of echo and reverb. In
the relatively new tradition of Camera Obscura, and in the very slightly older
tradition of indie music itself, the piano melody was simple but it was both
layered and defiantly, um, obscured by a Wall of Sound. There was elegance everywhere, and beauty
throughout, but the sonics were as cloudy as unrequited love.
At that point, Camera Obscura were two, going on three,
albums into a ten year, four-LP run of consecutive brilliance. And they were also two, going on three of
four albums with Carey Lander holding court at the keyboards. Now we must somehow learn to accept that
there will not be a fifth with Carey.
She passed away this month of recurrent and metastatic osteosarcoma.
Ms. Lander was a fixture on Stage Left of most Camera Obscura
concerts, bivouacked between terraces of keys.
She seemed, based upon six or seven concerts of observation, to be in
perpetual head-bopping mode while part of this efficient factory of melody. And she seemed to be perpetually in range of
eye contact with lead singer Tracyanne Campbell.
This latter detail was clearly important. Perhaps consistent with their middle-albums
tendencies toward noise and distortion, Camera Obscura have always been a
post-shoegaze study in stoicism. In
concert, Mss. Campbell and Lander “smiled” only rarely and with apparently
enormous internal resistance. While none
of the band ever seemed to be staring at their shoes, any abrupt concert turn
toward joy seemed to send the eyes of these two musicians immediately careening
toward their footwear, crumpled smirks forced downward.
Whether this was garden-variety shyness (doubt it: see below) or a much more complex, and
coordinated, method of interaction with the audience, the effect for
concert-going lovers of the band was equal parts hilarious, endearing and
alarming. If noisy applause and
adoration sent the women of Camera Obscura into squelched uncomfortable
grin-grimaces, what good were we as an admiring audience? And how could this vessel of musical
perfection sail on, in the absence of received gusts of kind regard?
Unrequited love, thy soundtrack was written by Camera
Obscura.
Having never met any of the band, it is this writer’s
opinion that a fair chunk of this stunning aesthetic was Carey’s
accomplishment. Both she and Ms.
Campbell donned absolutely incredible vintage threads for their gigs, sailing
onto stage like pale Glaswegian ghosts of melodies past, present and future. Try as you might to make them smile, try as
you might to humanize these larger than life spectres, they just wouldn’t
crack. Meanwhile the songs tumbled out,
invoking sad narrators and much sadder lovers of narrators.
This was all remarkably heady and well-conceived stuff for a
group of folks moving from their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Again, disproportionate credit seems due to
the departed, who was the only other person this writer heard of admitting to
having a few weeks ruined by the death of John Updike.
The world has lost a living classic, and so horribly many
years early. There is no hope of
replacing Carey Lander—no mould could produce more than one such work of art before
likewise passing on.
October 2015
