- Brian Campeau has been going at it, making interesting folk-rock-pop-electronic all sorts of things for so long, it seems like he has to set crazy challenges for each new record he releases, just to keep himself interested. Take for instance, 2009’s Mostly Winter Sometimes Spring where his goal was to use an instrument inappropriately in every song. My favourite was striking a harmonica; go on, you know it was asking for it. Come 2018 and he’s still at it, but this time the Old Dog and his New Tricks may have -almost accidentally- come up with a concept that will really resonate with audiences far beyond the fandom for found percussion and abstruse art-pop.
Arty musicians are notorious for being a bit down-in-the-mouth: being depressed is just more intellectually honest, yeah? Brian, cutting against the grain, decided and I quote: “to project positivity in his sound, cutting loose from any introspective, overly serious impressions that his music has made in the past.” Brian, being Brian has still worked all sorts of oddities into his latest, expansive clutch of songs and sometimes the attempts at being upbeat only make it as far as the bittersweet, but there’s also an undeniable handful of rather wonderful, mostly ‘70’s-tinged pop gems glinting in the tracklist for Old Dog, New Tricks.
It’s a funny thing, for an artist who is so self-consciously experimental, the new tricks on display across the record are borrowed liberally from the pop godheads of forty years ago. Take single Whatever Happened To Xanadu whose prog pop sounds like a psychedelic blend of ELO and Bread or the glorious close vocal harmonies of 1983 which sound like The Carpenters and The Beach Boys having a love in. Next October sounds like the guitar-work of Nick Drake underwriting the sunburst vocals of America. The takeaway from this is that, bowerbird or not, Campeau is a highly skilled musician and composer and he makes these work, boy does he.
Of course it wouldn’t be a Brian Campeau record if there weren’t some truly off-the-wall stuff, like the distorted production of the, again, Nick Drakeish, Two Repeating, or the strangely beautiful Slow Walking, which roars right back to the present with a trap beat (!), booming sub-bass and a falsetto vocal making it sound like Washed Out or How To Dress Well and then tricking it out with MOR soft-rock that sounds suspiciously like Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time. There are some moments which are just pure self-indulgence and, if you were going to be unkind, you might say they don’t work. Take the aptly titled Losing Friends which features a bizarre sample of a dog-bark, sutured roughly on to it.
There’s a lot more for an enthusiastic set of ears to sort through, from the heavy psych of Pie In The Sky or the strange undercurrent of slightly krautish, repeated rhythmic patterns which provide an unlikely foundation for much of the music here. Whatever strangeness lies within, it hasn’t stopped a wider audience from ogling those pop gems, the record has got heavy rotation on BBC6 among other places. Hey, isn’t that where pop gets put out to pasture? Shut your mouth! Brian Campeau is finding new life there. Rightly so: all of his tricks, old and new, make for an enthralling show.
- Chris Cobcroft.