Description

Look to the East, Look to the West, the new album by Camera Obscura, is a revelation. The Tracyanne Campbell-led outfit, reuniting with producer Jari Haapalainen (Let?s Get Out of This Country, My Maudlin Career), have crafted an album that simultaneously recalls why longtime fans have ferociously loved them for decades while also being their most sophisticated effort to date.

It is also the most hard-fought album of Camera Obscura?s career. Following the 2015 passing of founding keyboardist and friend Carey Lander (to whom the penultimate track ?Sugar Almond? is addressed), the band went into an extended hiatus. They remained in contact, but their status was uncertain until they announced their return, having been invited to perform as part of Belle & Sebastian?s 2019 Boaty Weekender cruise festival, along with a pair of sold-out warm-up shows in Glasgow. Donna Maciocia (keys and vocals) joined founding members Kenny McKeeve (guitar and vocals), Gavin Dunbar (bass), and Lee Thomson (drums and percussion) for those shows and has since become a regular songwriting partner of Campbell?s.

Recorded in the same room where Queen wrote ?Bohemian Rhapsody,? Look to the East, Look to the West feels big, a widescreen reframing of Camera Obscura?s sound that, paradoxically, saw the band go back to basics?there are no string or brass arrangements, with more emphasis placed on piano, synthesizers, Hammond organ, and drum machines, and, perhaps most strikingly, the group have dropped the veil of reverb that characterized their previous albums. The tinges of country and soul that give Camera Obscura?s baroque take on pop music its bittersweet edge have never been more apparent?guitars shimmer into the distance, keys haunt, and Campbell?s voice searches for the heart, reflecting on love, loss, and the passage of time.

Lead single ?Big Love? relishes in the space between country rock and prog, a pining break-up anthem featuring the soaring pedal steel of Tim Davidson. It?s a Nashville Sound heartbreaker, tackling the complexity of wanting to rekindle a bad relationship with Campbell?s uncanny ability to render the past: ?It was a big love, she said / That?s why it took ten years to get her out of her head,? she begins.

Description

The Brudenell is a lively and fun loving venue that embraces music and art under a wide and diverse umbrella that has no boundaries.

Our open music policy believes in freedom and creation and holds the belief that music and expression provide useful social interaction.

It is a community ‘non profitmaking’ venue, that holds charitable status, based in Leeds 6. The Brudenell Social Club is owned by its members, run by its members, for its members.

The Brudenell is most famous for hosting secret gigs for bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs. However, it has been a centrepiece of the Leeds music scene for a number of years, and hosts gigs most nights of the week, which are put on by a variety of local promoters.

33 Queens Road,

Burley,

Leeds,

West Yorkshire,

England,

LS6 1NY.

0113 275 2411