CAMERA OBSCURA - Let's Get Out Of This Country Review

On their first two albums, Glasgow six-piece Camera Obscura drew entirely justified and, but for the occasional "twee" tag, mostly favorable comparisons to Belle & Sebastian, Glasgow's other indie-pop band to specialize in melancholy, grandiose retro-styled pop songs. Their third full-length album, Let's Get Out Of This Country, finds Camera Obscura stepping out from the considerable shadow cast by Stuart Murdoch and pals, brimming with a newfound confidence and a bolder, more ambitious sonic palette than they've heretofore displayed....full text One of the buzzwords around liberal arts scholarship for the past few years has been “place.” Almost hopelessly broad, a call for a focus on “place” can include everything from architectural history to geology, or what some people have called the field of human geography. “Place,” as a buzzword and as a scholarly idea, is important for reminding scholars that the people and things they study (and, by association, their own work) doesn’t happen in a vacuum but in real physical spaces which have characteristics that, in and of themselves, are important to the way that we understand the world....full text Trying to do a Camera Obscura review and not mention the words 'Belle' and 'Sebastian' is like trying to wire a plug with a carrot, or talk about Johnny Borrell without uttering the word twat immediately afterwards. It simply can't be done. Accordingly, I'm gonna get all references to Stuart Murdoch and his twee collective out of the way right now:...full text