Summer Camp

Two years after their half-concept debut album Welcome to Condale, husband-wife duo Summer Camp have landed their eponymous follow-up for the Moshi Moshi label. Things are kept trendy, thanks to a keen aesthetic and a good eye for pop culture references, but Summer Camp is a decidedly more mature record than its predecessor, with the façade of Welcome to Condale cracked, and its sense of escapism dialled back.

Paradoxically, ‘The End’ starts the album sounding a tread foreign, with moodily alarming synthesisers and submerged backing vocals recounting an allegorical car-crash of a relationship. Everything presented has the feel of a prologue; of waltzing through the scenes of destruction which the song’s protagonists are powerless to stop, eventually climbing to a more familiar Summer Camp sound. ‘The End’ concludes self-contained and darkly hopeful, setting an ideal tone for the rest of the album to follow.

Proceedings become much more upbeat with summer single ’Fresh’, before the album takes an awkward swan-dive into the lush ‘Crazy’. The former is a hazy work, complete with sampled orchestration in the vein of ‘Better Off Without You’ and packing a ‘Get Lucky’-esque bass line. It even retains an enjoyable longevity even after multiple listens, filled with subtleties and easy-to-miss hooks indicative of the pair’s strong song-writing chops. ‘Crazy’ acts as cousin to album one’s ‘I Want You’: an annal of obsessive love set to a charming break-beat and slightly foreboding electronic sweeps. ‘Keep Falling’ continues to display Elizabeth Sankey’s layered girl-pop vocals to splendid effect, though perhaps for a little too long than benefits the arrangement itself.

This time, the characters are more realised, the lyrics more honest and sincere, and the nostalgia of the album cuts a mite closer to the bone than previous releases.

One of the most noticeable differences between albums is the change in production. Steve Mackey’s accessibly lo-fi stylings have since been replaced with Steven Street’s much more precise – and seemingly tailored – sound, which gives off the overall impression that the pair have had a lot more room to grow musically, with fewer places to hide. The addition of tour drummer William Bowerman helps many songs sound tighter as well as more organic, and consequently, Summer Camp sounds far more lucid as a listen than the duo’s debut. Things aren’t consistently hand-in-glove, however, as demonstrated in ‘I Got You’, which plays a little messy on the production front.

The album’s second half hits more sombre notes, evident on the confidently drawn-out and clement ‘Fighters’, the soft rap of ‘Everything Has Changed’, and ‘Phonecall’’s stately lament. Clocking in at nearly six minutes, the superb ‘Two Chords’ is used to pivot the focus onto the tangible regret of relationships past, as opposed to the heady swoon of falling in love. It’s a clear standout, with its pitch-bent melody and abundance of looped material working wonders to build on the uncertainty of making lives together, exemplifying the emotional hedonism of throwing yourself into someone’s arms with the wavering refrain of “Let me be perfect / That’s all I ever want.”

Where Welcome to Condale did its best to belie the truth that everything changes with age, Summer Camp is more measured in its scope. The characters are more realised, the lyrics more honest and sincere, and the nostalgia of the album cuts a mite closer to the bone than previous releases. At several turns the band admits that love and heartache can both upset and elate in equal measure, professedly drawing on their own lives spent together. This doesn’t stop the album being fun: often everything is kept at hand’s length and projected through rose-tinted glasses, though nothing reaches the dizzyingly delightful pace of favourites ‘Brian Krakow’ or ‘Down’.

There will be fewer moments where you’ll find yourself dancing in your bedroom, and more spent thinking about the past, wrapped in the album’s deft (but barely dominant) optimism. Summer Camp comes to a close with the pseudo-choral chorus of ‘Pink Summer’, and an unsatisfying mantra of “It’s not how much you love / It’s how much you are loved.” Such lyricisms seem to betray a lot of the album’s delivery with an overly-simple idea, but nonetheless, the overall result is one of quiet impression. With tremendous effort, and after delivering a worthy follow-up which keeps things fresh (pun intended), Summer Camp will enjoy acclaim and success with the twist of pace presented by their sophomore release.

Similar To: Tennis, Los Campesinos!

MP3: ‘Two Chords’, ‘Crazy’, ‘Fighters’