Cameras are a band with two guitarists, yet I’m in love with their piano sound. It’s rich and warm and what I imagine people who drink wine refer to as ‘deep and with a full palate’ when they’re trying to make the rest of us feel like we should buy it. Across a stellar debut record that is so good we specifically asked for them to take out the ad space that was reserved for their label, the Sydney three piece charm and disarm with said piano, evocative songwriting and some seriously heartbreaking riffs. Choosing this song over ‘Polarise’, my original tune for today, was a very difficult decision. But it showcases the band a bit more and aptly demonstrates how far you can go with four chords when they’re as gorgeously minor and haunting as these are. A band who I saw live multiple times before I heard anything laid down on wax, Cameras are intriguing not just because they sound like what being nineteen and in love with the impossible is all about, but because they’ve leapt straight into the spotlight sounding like professionals. Also, the first time I saw them I was convinced that frontman Fraser Harvey was orchestrating the second-coming of Interpol which will be perfectly fine with me for as long as my stolen DVD series of The OC from Thailand still work.
Not only a band with two guitarists, Cameras are a band with two singers. One is the aforementioned lead guitarist Harvey and the other is major drawcard and star of this number, Eleanor Dunlop. You know that saying ‘they could squeeze blood out of a stone’? Well that’s what Dunlop does with musical notes, more specifically with her voice, which is easily one of the most interesting things I’ve heard coming out of my speakers lately. Across ‘June’, it swoops and soars around the melody with breathy abandon, enthralling the listener with a stellar performance which only gets better as the chorus shifts to major and entire phrases consist of full-bodied vowel sounds that may or may not be words but I just don’t even care. She owns this song with a tone that’s consistent with some of the best female chanteuses of the last ten years of indie rock and she does it in a way that it doesn’t even seem like she’s working for it. Florence Welch has often said she wanted to sound like Kate Bush, but Dunlop sounds a bit like both. See if you can stay away.
What Cameras do have in droves is musical sensitivity. There was every chance for the band to go overboard on a song like this and turn it into a gigantic, thrashing, Evanescence kind of deal, but instead they simmer and sit back, allowing the piece to breathe as it should. This must be particularly difficult for their gun of a drummer, who manages the very unenviable task of not blowing out into glam-rock territory in many instances where lesser men (read: me) would have. But if you listen closely, you’ll notice those echoing guitars sounding out during the verse intros or adding colour in the most unobtrusive of places. For a band of individual talents to actually sound like a band isn’t actually all that common today, which is a big part of my attraction to Cameras. Also, this song’s bass line reminds me of the second half of Sigur Ros’ Sæglópur, which was just as emotionally powerful.
Cameras – ‘June’
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