3 Music Reviews

Camera Obscura, Let's Get Out of This Country (Merge)

With each album Camera Obscura is becoming one of the most satisfying pop bands around. Though often jacketed by critics with too-easy comparisons to Belle & Sebastian, the group's sound has in fact always been surprisingly inclusive, drawing on delightful pop styles of decades past - especially '50s and '60s vocal pop (the "girl groups, "Motown classics, etc.) and old-time country ballads. With their third album Let's Get Out of This Country they've perfected that approach - all of these influences seem both more pronounced and more distinctly theirs. It's an especially lush album, soaked in strings and voices that express words of longing and wistfulness through the loveliest of melodies. Camera Obscura are making gorgeous, elegant pop music these days, the finest of the sort, with an emphasis on melody and harmony, on atmospheric sound and perfectly constructed arrangements. Lead singer Tracyanne Campbell has a crystar-clear, moving yet youthful voice. Combined with the lyrics, which speak a universal language of emotions - with a particular sense of yearning wrapped in thoughts of dashed expectations and unfulfilled hopes - and the classically pop-centered music, it helps make this music feel timeless. It's impeccably stylish but also emotionally relevant: music for the ages. When on the last song Campbell softly sings, "I tried to be happy / it wasn't easy" and then the music kicks into this light ramble that ends in a symphonic reverie, it's one more perfect moment on an album that's filled with them. - dave heaton

The Lil' Hospital, Heavy Metal (Total Gaylord)

The Lil' Hospital's album Heavy Metal is filled with cute pop melodies played bare-bones DIY style. The songs bounce along, jump into your head, and have a child-like sort of simplicity and energy...I keep thinking of the Modern Lovers singing "Wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round...", though Jojo never sang the f-word and is notoriously finicky about sound quality. There's also a side of Lil' Hospital that embraces dissonance - that likes the way the violin sounds when it barges into a kiddie-pop song, likes how voices sounds when they're slightly off-key, how instruments sound when they're a bit out of tune. There's a rebellious kind of warped-ness to the songs, even though they're also these simple, goofy, straight-from-the-heart love letters and jokes. The songs are catchy as can be, and lots of fun for it; they'll have you singing along constantly. Yet I also greatly enjoy the times when things feel a bit off. - dave heaton

Smoosh, Free to Stay (Barsuk)

A newspaper-style lead for an article on Smoosh would have to cover their backstory, the fact that the duo consists of 14- and 12-year-old sisters who have been playing as a band for four or so years now. Jason McGerr, drummer for Death Cab for Cutie, was their drum teacher and produced this album, their second. And so on and so forth...but the real story about Smoosh is how fresh their music sounds, how unique it is, and how exciting. Their music is simple in set-up: Asya sings and plays the keyboards, Chloe plays drums and sings. The drumming's straighforward, effective in its lack of flourishes. The keyboards take center stage, generally with a clean, electric piano sound and occasionally with a more 'rock', laser-beam style. Asya's singing is direct, and can be quite emotional, as on songs like "Waiting for Something", with lines like "I don't know why I do these things / I always regret them / in the end." But it's also quite lovely-sounding, itself an instrument that helps make their music bright and stirring despite its minimalism. Or because of it, maybe - what's unique about their music is how unadorned, how direct it is, yet how it doesn't feel that way. It's direct, sometimes rather forceful pop music that also feels like a gentle pillow, but in motion. There's no other band right now that sounds quite like Smoosh, even though it's hard to pinpoint why through just a written description of their style. Maybe it's a freshness that comes from youth? Perhaps, but fixating on their age seems like a bad idea, as these songs sound like they'll last. - dave heaton