Track Listing

1. Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken
2. Tears For Affairs
3. Come Back Margaret
4. Dory Previn
5. False Contender
6. Let's Get Out Of This Country
7. Country Mile
8. If Looks Could Kill
9. I Need All The Friends I Can Get
10. Razzle Dazzle Rose

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15410 in Music
• Released on: 2007-06-25
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Alternative Power Pop at its Very Best
This album is simply awesome - it's sweet, pretty and just plain lovely. It is also truly original, not following any trend in modern music that I know of. Considering it's full of fabulous pop songs, this is some mean feat. I hope they never sell out and chase the money, but I think they love what they do so us fans are safe this time.

It's a shame it has been recorded a bit to too loud in places, leading to a brash top end - their earlier recordings were nicer (I hope you get to read this Camera Obscura). Still, the producer may have made it too loud perhaps spoiling some of the lovliness, but the arrangements are just fabulous, this is one hell of a good album.

Keeps getting better
I came late to the band - this was the first Camera Obscura album I'd heard. Now I'm buying the back catalogue.
A terrific mix of apparently light-hearted tunes and melancholy, reflective lyrics. All beautifully played and sung. It sounds like a distant relation to early St.Etienne at times, and that's high praise.
Most importantly, it still sounds good after being played to death for weeks. This album is one of those that I will still be playing in many years time.

Get ready to be heartbroken
Breaking up is painful and miserable, though sometimes necessary. And evidently that's what was on the mind of Camera Obscura as they created "Let's Get Out of This Country." These Scottish indiepoppers created a smooth, nostalgic, rippling little pop gem full of doleful emotion, and boy does it feel good.

The opening song "Lloyd I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken" is a deliciously catchy pop number full of soaring strings and rattly tambourine, which is a response to Lloyd Cole's "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?" Most of it, though, is just about a girl who has "a life of complication to sort out."

It's followed up by the folky, accordion-riddled little melody of "Tears For Affairs," an anguished little song played in a very peppy, upbeat manner. That is the basic template for the songs on this album: frolicking catchy indiepop, warm ballads, rippling organ rockers, bouncy alt-rock, and ambient, wintry pop filled with strings.

And every single one is about breaking up with someone, cheating on someone, or leaving someone behind.

Camera Obscura are always working to break out of Belle & Sebastian's shadow, since they're both quirky chamberpop bands from Scotland. But "Let's Get Out of This Country" shows that their music is of a totally different kind -- it's darker, less pensive and bookish, and more filled with raw emotion.

The music is overflowing with peppy instrumentation -- violin, trumpet, tambourine, some mandolin and subtle accordion laid over the basic bouncy guitars and drums. And of course, there's warm waves of organ adding a colourful edge, and helping to accentuate just how fun and pretty the music is.

Until you actually listen to the words: all of them are sad and anguished, except maybe the cryptic "Razzle Dazzle Rose, which seems a bit out of place here. All of it is in Tracyanne Campbell's pretty mellow voice. "Come back Margaret, he wants to adore you/Come back Margaret, I'd like to explore you/Can't you see the tears in my eyes/With love for him I disguise?"

"Let's Get Out of this Country" is the sprightliest album ever to be filled with woe and relationship misery, and Camera Obscura did a brilliant job linking the two sounds. Definitely worth hearing.