Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell on her favourite album: “How can it be so good?”
If you Google the words “camera obscura”, you’ll be met with invitations to book tickets to Edinburgh’s Museum of Illusions before you stumble across any information about a wee twee pop outfit from Glasgow. Whether this is a result of their SEO-unfriendly band name or not, Camera Obscura have never received the success and spotlight they deserved.
Camera Obscura’s sound is a collage of gentle harmonies, quaint pop instrumentation, and sugary sweet vocals provided by singer Tracyanne Campbell. It’s music to mark the first day of spring, music to soundtrack nostalgic coming-of-age movies, and music to dance around the kitchen to with your lover at 3am and romanticise every second. It’s pop in its purest form.
Whether Campbell is struggling to control her feelings of love on ‘French Navy’ or responding to the calls to heartbreak made by Lloyd Cole on ‘Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken’, each Camera Obscura song harnesses a wonder about the world that can be difficult to find and is essential to hold onto when you do.
With Camera Obscura’s talent for sweet yet euphoric pop, it makes sense that Campbell’s favourite album features a similar format. During a chat with Under the Radar, the songwriter shared her love for country pop star Kacey Musgraves and, more specifically, her 2018 record, Golden Hour. As lush and polished as any Camera Obscura release, the album featured similarly perfect pop songwriting.
With Musgraves’ country-infused voice at the helm, the album pulls in clean strums, instrumental swells and gorgeous melodies to earn that title. On ‘High Horse’, for example, Musgraves urges the subject of her song to “giddy up and ride straight out of this town, you and your high horse,” between banjo plucks, providing a playful, disco-infused modern take on the country genre.
Campbell was particularly taken in by Musgraves’ songwriting prowess on the record, comparing the fruits of her labour to “really classic ‘60s pop songs, so strong, so powerful. Every trick in the book.” While some could consider this approach to be twee, Campbell shared her admiration for the “barefaced cheek of it,” considering it “an exercise in songwriting, really ticking all the boxes”.
Golden Hour really does tick all the boxes when it comes to pop songwriting. There are catchy melodies that will leave you desperately trying to emulate Musgraves’ wavering vocals on the word “high horse,” the production is seamless throughout the entire runtime of the record, and there’s just enough influence from other genres to keep things interesting. But there is an honesty to the record, too. There’s a feeling of something beneath all that pop polish.
In this way, it’s easy to see why the Camera Obscura frontwoman is such a fan of Golden Hour. Though she was making music decades before Musgraves, on a completely different continent, Campbell shares a real penchant for pure pop with the country superstar. The result of their efforts may sound completely different, but their sonic goals are fairly similar.
While Musgraves’ Texan roots and her love for country music spill into her pop songwriting, Camera Obscura created a slightly more subdued, sentimental form of indie pop with lush soundscapes and declarations of love. Each of them has earned their place as perfect pop songwriters in their own way.
