Camera Obscura

Since 1996 · United Kingdom

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Let's Get Out of This Country (2006)

Let's Get Out of This Country wraps Tracyanne Campbell's wry, wounded lyrics in lush, string-and-horn arrangements that recall classic girl-group pop more than anything else in Glasgow's indie scene. "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken" announces its wit in the title alone, Campbell's voice riding a bright, driving arrangement that makes heartbreak sound almost celebratory. The whole record balances that same tension between melancholy lyrics and genuinely joyful production throughout. It's the album that finally carried the band's small-scale charm to an audience well beyond Scotland.

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Camera Obscura

Let's Get Out of This Country · 2006

Camera Obscura formed in Glasgow in 1996, emerging from a scene overlapping closely with Belle and Sebastian, whose Stuart Murdoch produced some of the band's earliest recordings before Tracyanne Campbell established herself as the group's primary songwriter and voice. Their sound leaned toward classic girl-group pop and orchestral arrangement more than the more literary twee surrounding them, giving Campbell's wry, heartbroken lyrics a warmer, more retro frame.

Let's Get Out of This Country, their third album, arrived in 2006 on Merge Records and became the record that carried the band to a wider international audience after a decade of steady, low-key work. Keyboardist Carey Lander died of cancer in 2015, and the band went quiet for years afterward before eventually returning. Camera Obscura's catalog has aged into a quietly durable body of work, still cited well beyond the scene it emerged from.