Posts have been a little slow recently. I've been trying to write my damned philosophy PhD thesis. And I've been tending to use my free time to, er, listen to music, rather than write about it. The whole work/music/trying-to-have-a-life-outside-work-and-music matrix doesn't leave me with too much time for blogging, but to keep No Good Advice active, I'm going to try to post a video every day for a week. A shiny pop video for you! Every day! We'll see how far I get with this.
Anyway, the first in this series is Camera Obscura's 'French Navy', lead single from their amaaaaazing new album, My Maudlin Career.
Lovely. Camera Obscura are clearly in thrall to Spector/Motown sixties pop; like Amy Winehouse, but unlike the godawful Duffy, they succeed in matching, and not just invoking, that source material, because they inhabit it with the same sense of aching romanticism that animated the best of those sixties records. In other words 'French Navy' is an amazing and perfect pop song on the same terms as 'Be My Baby' or 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine', and isn't just an exercise in trying to sound like those songs.
The emotional drive of 'French Navy', and all of My Maudlin Career, comes from frontwoman Tracyanne Campbell, and in particular from her very particular on-record persona. Brian Howe, reviewing My Maudlin Career for Pitchfork, hits the nail on the head: "on one hand, she's a hopeless romantic. On the other, she's very cautious, and somewhat pessimistic." Romanticism, tempered by pessimism, is the prevailing mood of the album. (This is not to be confused with the romanticised pessimism repeatedly raked over by Campbell's fellow '60s pop affectionado, Morrissey.) Campbell wants to believe in love and romance and get carried away with those soaring, elegiac sixties strings; but that romanticism makes her vulnerable, and she's scared of getting hurt, or judged. So throughout the record she tries to use her sadness as a defence mechanism, tries to tell herself that she never expected anything from the world but pain and rejection. On 'Forests & Sands' she wishes her blood would freeze ("like the river in Toronto"), and a couple of songs later, on "Honey In The Sun", she wishes her heart was "as cold as the morning dew".
This tension, between the swooning romanticism of the music and Campbell's fear of giving in to it, is all over the fantastic 'French Navy'. She's worried about being "criticised for letting you break my heart", and even demands that her lover sell the very idea of a relationship to her, so desperate is she to retain as much control as possible, to remain safe ("relationships were something I used to do," she declares, before demanding: "convince me they are better for me and you"). But as those strings pulse around her voice on the chorus, she gives up: "I wanted to control it," she sadly confesses, "but, love, I couldn't hold it". The double meaning of 'hold' here is just the conflation that drives My Maudlin Career; to 'hold' on to love, she must rise above it, master it, 'control' it. Impossible, says 'French Navy', with its melancholic-yet-euphoric Phil Spector gallop.
Also, along with 'Young Adult Friction', 'French Navy' ensures that there hasn't been a brilliant indiepop single in 2009 so far that doesn't have the word 'library' in the first line. I'm just saying.
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