Look To The East, Look To The West

Description

Look to the East, Look to the West, the new album by Camera Obscura, is a revelation. The band led by Tracyanne Campbell, who reunited with producer Jari Haapalainen (Let's Get Out of This Country, My Maudlin Career), has crafted an album that reminds long-time fans why they have fiercely loved them for decades, while also being their most sophisticated effort to date. It is also the most challenging album of Camera Obscura's career. After the death in 2015 of founding keyboardist and friend Carey Lander, the band went on an extended hiatus until 2019. Look to the East, Look to the West feels grand, a widescreen re-framing of Camera Obscura's sound that, paradoxically, has seen the band return to the essentials. There are no string or brass arrangements; the focus is on piano, synthesizers, Hammond organ, and drum machines, and perhaps most strikingly, the band has dropped the veil of reverb that characterized their previous albums. The shades of country and soul that give Camera Obscura's baroque pop its bittersweet edge have never been more evident. Guitars shimmer in the distance, the keys haunt, and Tracyanne Campbell's voice seeks the heart, reflecting on love, loss, and the passage of time.