Camera Obscura: Music that looks like something
Scotland has a specific beauty to it. It may be in the way that nature and the works of man seem more as one than you might find in other lands. The way rugged cliffs soar and merge seamlessly with the ruined castles at their peaks. Or the seemingly endless miles of narrow roads as you get out into the country, tightly defined by short stone walls on either side.
“It’s a dying art,” Gavin Dunbar says of those walls, which stand for decades — longer even — without mortar. Vegetation creeps into the stones, moss emerges. They become a part of the earth. Dunbar’s uncle was one of the artists who built those walls. “Patience,” Durbar says. “I think really, it’s a lot of patience. They stay up, so they must be doing something right. It’s just the way you place the stones.”
Dunbar, a bassist, and the ethereal-voiced Tracyanne Campbell first began playing together in 1996, and out of that has emerged Camera Obscura, here Wednesday at the German House Theater. Now a lush, five-piece band, its DNA is tightly wound around its fellow Glasgow band, Belle & Sebastian. “The Sweetest Thing,” from the latest album, My Maudlin Career, feels like ’60s girl-group harmonies, Motown or French pop of that era, backed by banks of strings. “Hands Up Baby,” from an EP a couple of years ago, is a spooky, minor-key duet between Campbell and guitarist Kenny McKeeve: “I only hit you because I hate myself,” McKeeve sings. Camera Obscura’s upbeat beauty is countered on all sides by walls of sadness and endless broken hearts. Its indie heart beats like Yo La Tengo, if it were produced by Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound. Perhaps the Camera Obscura tour bus runs on tears.
“We have our moments but, on the whole, we’re a fairly happy bunch, really,” Dunbar says. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously. If we were constantly miserable, we’d have almost gone mad by now.”
There must be an explanation for this; an air of despondency can often be detected in the music of Belle & Sebastian, and earlier spirits from the area, such as Donovan. Is it just that corner of the world, where ancient stone buildings wear the fight against time and the elements, as oblivious to the passing generations of humans crawling around on the streets as you or I might be to the insects crawling in the crack of a stone wall? “I guess it must have a big influence on us,” Dunbar says. “Most of us have lived in Glasgow our whole lives. It has weather and lifestyle, and that kind of seeps through the whole way of life there.
“There is a lot of rain. Perhaps it is too wet to go outdoors, so we just sit inside and think.”
Dunbar is an understated fellow. He uses the word “fairly” often, as a modifier that tamps down overstatement or expectation. But rain and nearby bands may have less to do with Camera Obscura’s sound than what’s in the DVD player. The sound is a vision. Camera Obscura’s music looks like something. “The films we like have been a massive influence on how we go,” Dunbar says. “I suppose we share a retro-aesthetic feel with them. The films we like are a larger influence on us than the bands we listen to.”
David Lynch films in particular. Yes, Dunbar agrees, if Camera Obscura were ever to do a film soundtrack, it must be for Lynch. Lynch’s atmospheric, moody film and subsequent television series, Twin Peaks, particularly appealed to the band. It was memorably set in the Pacific Northwest, a rainy, fog-shrouded corner of the world that in many ways looks like Scotland. “Musically quite similar as well,” Dunbar says. “Similar culture, politics.”
Getting out and seeing a world beyond the west central lowlands beyond Glasgow, beautiful as it is, was when Camera Obscura began to really blossom. “We built up a lot of confidence in ourselves,” Dunbar says. “The first time we came to the States to tour, we just felt that we turned the corner. It was the first place we toured, the first time it wasn’t just the odd show, but actually came and did four or five weeks. You have to get on with it. You’re here to work, playing every night. You dig in and go for it.”
Getting out ignites that sense of wonder. You find that the Pacific Northwest feels like home. And Mexico City feels like anything but Glasgow. “We played inside a building that had the world’s largest mural,” Dunbar says. “The walls and ceiling were one massive mural. Just interconnected faces, arms, bodies, eyes. And watching the crowd going fairly nuts, it was a fairly electric atmosphere.”
And very Lynchian. But what city has served as a film set more often than New York City? “Eight, 10,000 people at a free show,” Dunbar says of a 2007 concert at the South Street Seaport. “To play a show with the backdrop of New York, at night, all lit up … it was fairly incredible.”
If you go
What: Camera Obscura, with Papercuts.
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday.
Where: German House Theater.
Tickets: $15 advance, $17 the day of the show, available at the door or on line: www.croquetshows.com.
Web: www.camera-obscura.net.
