Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career

But by the time of 2006's excellent Let's Get Out Of This Country, Camera Obscura's closest musical brethren were the Swedish act The Concretes.� The two acts shared a producer (Jari Haapalainen) and a similarly irresistible sound: Spectorish drums, sweeping strings and female singers whose voices sound like Nico after a few singing lessons.

Sonically speaking, My Maudlin Career (again produced by Haapalainen) isn't a massive departure from its predecessor.� The album begins with French Navy, a pop song just as irresistible as LGOOTC's opener, Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken.� It's a big, lovable whirlwind of excitable strings, an ecstatic chorus and one of 2009's most happy-making lyrics thus far: "You with your dietary restrictions / Said you loved me with a lot of conviction".

But the ebullience of French Navy doesn't prove to be representative of the album as a whole.� This is a sad record, and not in the sweetly melancholic, happy-to-be-unhappy manner you might expect.� My Maudlin Career refuses to dress its dolour in cutesy sentiments: many of its lyrics express the writer's misery quite bluntly. "How many times have you told me you want to die? / How many times will I let you get away with murder?" sings Traceyanne Campbell on Away With Murder, while songs such as James and the title track are similarly haunted by romantic betrayal: "You broke me, I thought I knew you well"; "In your eyes there's a sadness / Enough to kill the both of us...They make me want to give up on love".

Every track here has something going for it in musical terms: Swans is blessed with a chiming guitar hook; the title track features a stately, ice-pick piano figure worthy of Abba, while Careless Love is perhaps their most soulful moment to date.

If this album has a problem, it's a lack of variety.� After French Navy, it settles into a slow-to-mid-tempo groove.� The album's closing third is clogged up with a succession of ballads; this, coupled with the generally bleak lyrics, means that the listener may well have lost the will to live before the brass-enhanced closer Honey In The Sun belatedly perks up proceedings.� My Maudlin Career is crying out for the equivalent of If Looks Could Kill off Let's Get Out Of This Country: something to heave the album out of its sulk and propel it to its climax.

Ultimately My Maudlin Career proves a little too successful in its evocation of sadness.� It's the musical equivalent of the death of Bambi's mother: exquisitely rendered, but, once experienced for the first time, you need to steel yourself for subsequent visits.

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