The Return of Camera Obscura

WHY is it that so many of the band we like here at the Misread City -- a site dedicated to West Coast culture -- come from Glasgow, a city whose cold/rainy weather and Victorian/industrial cityscape is about as far from sunny coastal California as we could imagine?

It may be because so many of these bands seem influenced by '60s West Coast pop -- Pet Sounds, the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, Love. Or it just might be that for all our regional chauvinism, we are willing to recognize musical quality, especially when it comes in the shape of great melodies and songcraft.

One of  our favorite Scottish bands, Camera Obscura, has a new album, Desire Lines, which comes out next week. (The snappy single "Do It Again" is getting a lot of play on KCRW.) We've loved this band since we heard their early song "Suspended From Class," and dig the new record heavily. Try this video for this somewhat gloomy song I really love, Fifth in Line

HERE is our interview with the group's lead singer, which took place when My Maudlin Career, the last Camera Obscura record, came out.

They're at the Wiltern on June 18. A much more assertive live band than you'd guess from all the wistfulness. See you there.

Stevie Jackson on the West Coast

ONE of the things we have to do from time to time here is to admit that not all of the finest 21st century culture comes from the West Coast. (Okay, just most of it.) Exhibit A is the Scottish band Belle & Sebastian, who have been perhaps our favorite band since the fadeout of (West Coast band, sort of) Pavement in the late '90s.

And one on the key members of that excellently melodic indie rock combo is guitarist Stevie Jackson, sometimes known as Stevie Reverb for his signature retro style.

B&S of course, started out as a folkie vehicle for singer Stuart Murdoch, but several other members have since put their respective stamps on the band. Jackson has brought a snappy '60s tune-manship to the group, and he's written some of their best songs -- "Seymour Stein," "Jonathan David,"  "To Be Myself Completely."

Not long ago, Jackson brought out the LP (I Can't Get No) Stevie Jackson, which is not as consistent as a B&S record but has its share of gems. (I'm especially fond of the opening track, "Pure of Heart.")

And this week, the Glaswegian axe-slinger is way out West. Tonight he's in Austin; Thursday night he is in LA to play the Bootleg Theater. He's in San Francisco Portland before heading back to Scotland.

Here's a video of Stevie playing an acoustic 12-string.

Teenage Fanclub On Its Way

RARELY has a band gone from overrated to undersung so quickly. But when the air went out of the "alternative" boom in the mid-'90s, some great bands got lost in the flood. Teenage Fanclub's Gram Parsons-flavored Songs From Northern Britain, from 1997, proved that this group was made of more than just feedback drenched irony. But almost nobody in this country heard it.

So it's a real pleasure to have the Glaswegian band back in Los Angles for the first time in five years: They play the El Rey on Monday night. Their new LP, Shadows, on Merge, is low-key and bittersweet, like most of their recent work, with some great songs in "Baby Lee," "The Fall," and "When I Still Have Thee."

HERE is my interview with the band from when they last visited our shores.

Oh -- and LA's Radar Bros. open the show.

Bert Jansch at Largo

SUNDAY night I was lucky enough to catch Britfolk guitarist Bert Jansch at Largo. It may've been the most stunning display of acoustic guitar I have seen in my life -- and I have seen legendary axe-man Richard Thompson at least a dozen times. Now I know why Neil Young calls him the Hendrix of the acoustic: The shadings and nuance this stolid and unremarkable looking man coaxed out of his instrument while sitting quietly onstage were close to head spinning.

Jansch, a Scot who broke in mid-'60s Britain as a solo artist and as one of several dazzling jazz-influenced folk revivalists in the band Pentangle, has experienced a revival of his own lately. His last record, The Black Swan, was released on indie-hipster Drag City and saw cameos by Devendra Banhart and Beth Orton. He's been acknowledged not only by his peers but by Johnny Marr of the Smiths, who build some of the band's signature shimmer from Jansch's style, and younger musicians like Noel Gallagher and the Libertines' Pete Doherty, with whom he played in London not long ago.

A serious illness caused Jansch to cancel a tour recently, and as he's approaching 70 I'd given up on the chance to see him perform.

But Jansch just completed a short tour with St. Neil, who idolizes him also. I will let the readers do the math to note that Pegi Young's band -- she is the man's wife -- opened the Largo show. Overall this was generic alt-country, including Lucinda Williams' lovely "Side of the Road," which highlighted the limits of Ms. Young's singing. But the band itself, was terrific, strong all the way through with standouts being Anthony Crawford on a Gretsch White Falcon (!), Nashville pedal steel legend Ben Keith (Patsy Cline) and storied soul man Spooner Oldham (Percy Sledge, Aretha) on keyboards.

With all the alt-country high spirits I thought Bert's solo acoustic set would seem dour by comparison. But while many of the songs were gloomy, introspective Celtic ballads, my heart was racing nearly the whole time. He played a number of trad songs (introducing "Blackwaterside," whose chords were stolen by Jimmy Page much as Paul Simon took Martin Carthy's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair") and made several references to Anne Briggs, the enigmatic angel-voiced folk goddess with whom he once worked and lived. If memory serves he also played, on Sunday, "Rosemary Lane" and "Angie." Gracious and laconic between songs -- praising the Largo audience's reverential silence -- he gives off a distinctively understated vibe. (A friend who saw him in the '70s recalls him as being both rude and smashed -- this was a very different Bert.)

The sound system at what's now called Largo at the Coronet was perfect for the gentle fingerpicking Jansch favors, with its bends, weird voicings, hammer-ons and pull-offs. (He played almost the whole show, for what it's worth, with a capo between the 2rd and 6th frets.) By the time he encored with the frightening suicide ode "Needle of Death," which may be his best song, I was ready to explode. I have much of Jansch's recorded work, and own a recording of almost everything he played that night, but had no idea how genuinely moving and quietly virtuosic this show would be.

All hail Bert!

David Brooks at Occidental College

On Sunday morning I was lucky enough to eavesdrop on the commencement at Oxy, my wife's alma mater, and stand at the far edge of a natural amphitheater, under an old oak tree alongside a eucalyptus grove, to see the address by David Brooks.

The commencement speech by Brooks, the New York Times columnist associated with the neo-conservative movement, came after honorary degrees given to a number of other luminaries, including Warner Bros/ Dreamworks exec Mo Ostin, one of the few non-weasels in the music industry and the man who helped record everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Elliott Smith.

Brooks speech began with a bit of mild, genial standup, but then became more interesting. Mostly, he was there to recount to a mostly liberal or left audience of students and faculty how he had moved, after a childhood as a New York liberal, grounded in the Enlightenment, to conservatism. Once he got going, the address was Brooks at his best.

"When I graduated college, I guess you could say I was optimistic... that solving social problems would be relatively easy," as long as government was full of good and compassionate people. But when he covered Chicago as a reporter, and wrote about the clearing of blighted neighborhoods to build projects, he realized that urban renewal "tore down something they couldn't even see." Social relations were destroyed . "Before long these housing projects were horrible and uninhabitable."

While covering education, the paranoid and un-trusting last years of the Soviet Union, and disease in Africa, he came to see things in in common with various failed policies: "They all had in common a truncated view of human nature, that we are rational, autonomous beings... who respond to incentives."

Instead, he began to learn the role of emotions, unconscious biases, and the limits of utopian planning. "I switched from being a child of the French Enlightenment, to being a child of the British Enlightenment," under the sway of Edmund Burke with his "epistemological modesty" -- and Scots Adam Smith and David Hume.

And he began to realize, as he gradually digested the lessons of Stanford's "marshmallow experiment," he came around to Daniel Pat Moynihan's realization that "culture" and character are what matter, and a Burkean respect for limits, tradition and the way reform can destroy "invisible but important social relations."

Some of the speech was fascinating, if familiar from Brooks' columns. But it was interesting paired with the conditions these Oxy students are graduating into: A national economy destroyed by the "magic of the marketplace" trumpeted by Smith's disciples, by three decades of the kind of free-market/anti-government conservatism Brooks embraces, by all kinds of international and environmental problems created by a president Brooks supported, and a state government in absolute shambles because of the conservative, anti-tax Proposition 13 (which has led to me paying more in property tax for my cottage in a middle-class neighborhood than Warren Buffett pays for one of his Laguna mansions) and an obnoxious Republican governor who has simply passed debt down the road.

Even more boldly, Brooks's almost fatalistic worldview -- however intelligent it evolution -- was virtually contradicted by some of the other speakers honored on Sunday. Most clearly, Father Gregory Boyle, who runs gang-intevention group Homeboy Industries, and the two Latina women in the group - Patricia Alireza and Suzanna Guzman -- who became a pioneering physics professor and an opera diva, respectively, complicate the picture a little bit. (Not to mention our current president, who began his academic career at Oxy and benefited, like yours truly, from tons of financial aid, a progressive plan targeted by many conservatives.) Boyle's group has had an enormous amount of success in gangland L.A. and shows that social change, when implemented carefully, is possible. (The group is no, like most nonprofits, struggling because of the recession and has laid off more than half its staff.)

Anyway, I enjoyed Brooks' speech and the lovely SoCal weather, as I enjoy his column and his book, Bobos in Paradise. (And wishing all those fresh Oxy grads a better economy than they have now.) He is at the very least an honorable, if at times glib, guy. But I would have loved to heat what he, Boyle, and the others would have had to say to each other.

Update: Brooks has posted a version of his speech as a New York Times column, here: "We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment," he writes. "Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one."

Monster of Folk: Bert Jansch

I'M not sure i can think of another musician who's been powerfully influential on both johnny marr of the smiths and zeppelin-era jimmy page. bert jansch, the british folk guitarist born on this day in 1943, has not only put his stamp on heavy metal and early indie rock -- not to mention his own generation of folk rockers -- he's a hero to freak-folk types like devendra banhart.

jansch was born in glasgow, scotland and came of age with the british folk-rock movement of the 60s: he helped found the band pentangle, like fairport convention dedicated to digging into the origins of british and celtic music and myth. his solo stuff is wonderful, if uneven, veering between acoustic and electric: it's best heard on the 2-cd compilation "the dazzling stranger." i love the way he bends the hell out of his notes and drones and tolls.

here is an old video clip of the solo acoustic "black waterslide," which zeppelin basically stole.

my favorite jansch, oddly, is his '06 record, "the black swan." not only are the songs strong from first to last, it includes delicious contributions from banhart and beth orton. mostly, this is a dark record that i play incessantly in the winter, alongside john fahey and bach's cello suites. "the black swan" was graham coxon of blur's record of the year in '06.

here are two songs from that record, with, alas, no video. the second, "when the sun comes up," has beth orton on lead vocals.

Jansch cancelled a US tour this summer because of illness, posting this on his website:

"Bert is very sorry to be missing the tour, and apologises to all the fans who were hoping to see him. He is looking forward to rescheduling as soon as possible.”

here we are looking forward to the return of this monster of folk. we'll toast a small glass of single-male scotch to you this evening.

Camera Obscura and the Glasgow Sound

EVER since i first heard lloyd cole and the commotions at an impressionable age, i've been crazy for scottish rock n roll and especially bittersweet music of glasgow. it's one of the finest legacies in rock music history, putting supposedly sophisticated cities like san francisco and boston to shame. only, i think, portland, ore., and manchester, uk, have better batting averages. (i'm overlooking quarterflash here, btw.)

one band that both exemplifies glasgow's tradition of melody and intelligence (heard in glaswegian bands as different as the jesus & mary chain and teenage fanclub) and fights against its associations is camera obscura, whose new LP just came out. HERE is my interview, which advances a US tour and will run in various metromix papers around the country.

they are tired, TIRED of being told they sound like belle & sebastian, but if you cant wait for the new LP by stuart and the boys waste no time in picking up "let's get our of this country" or "my maudlin career." here's a video of the new single, "french navy," a song that begins "in a dusty library" and then travels the world.

i spoke to traceyanne campbell, the band's singer and songwriter, about music -- she grew up loving patsy cline, and her grandfather cried when roy orbison died -- as well as her own depression and how she deals with it in music. (i think of donne's line about "grief brought to numbers.")

(serious glaswegians will know that the wonderful "country" record began with "lloyd, i'm ready to be heartbroken," video here, an answer song in to cole's early "are you ready to be heartbroken?" i was pleased to hear from campbell that cole's work is still a major part of indie culture in glasgow and that bars and clubs play his stuff readily. more on cole's music in another post.)

as for camera obscura, they'll be in LA, at the henry fonda, on june 11. as i say in the interview, their show last time around was surprisingly extroverted and fun.