Look to the East, Look to the West [CD]

"Look to the East, Look to the West", the new album from Camera Obscura, is a revelation. The Tracyanne Campbell-led band has teamed up again with producer Jari Haapalainen to create an album that reminds us why longtime fans have loved them dearly for decades, and is also their most ambitious work to date. It is also the most hotly contested album of Camera Obscura's career.

After the death of founding member, keyboardist and friend Carey Lander in 2015 (to whom the penultimate track "Sugar Almond" is dedicated), the band went on an extended hiatus. They stayed in touch, but their status was uncertain. After being invited to perform as part of Belle & Sebastian's 2019 Boaty Weekender cruise festival, they announced their return. Donna Maciocia (keyboards and vocals) joined founding members Kenny McKeeve (guitar and vocals), Gavin Dunbar (bass) and Lee Thomson (drums and percussion) at these shows and has been Campbell's songwriting partner ever since.

Recorded in the same room where Queen wrote Bohemian Rhapsody, Look to the East, Look to the West feels big, a widescreen reinterpretation of the Camera Obscura sound that paradoxically saw the band going back to basics - there are no string or horn arrangements, the emphasis is on piano, synthesizers, Hammond organ and drum machines, and, perhaps most strikingly, the group have dropped the reverb veil that characterized their earlier albums.

The hint of country and soul that makes Camera Obscura's baroque take on pop music so bittersweet has never been more apparent - the guitars shimmer into the distance, the keys haunt, and Campbell's voice searches for the heart, reflecting on love, loss and the passage of time. "Look to the East, Look to the West" is camera obscura at its best and most impressive, an album that completely rearranges the listener's emotional core, leaving them sad and elated at the same time.

Camera Obscura's catalog is full of songs that people describe as life-changing, songs that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. "Look to the East, Look to the West" has 11 of them.