Camera Obscura’s Let’s Get Out of This Country is still twee music at its finest

When most people say they were born in the wrong generation, they mean a sanitized, Bridgertonian Victorian era or the Sixties conveniently sans Vietnam. Not I: when I say I was born in the wrong generation, I mean I really ought to have been a millennial. In an ideal world, I’d be in a Peter Pan-collared A-line dress, flouncing through the streets of some indistinct walkable city with a first-generation iPod in hand. I attempted the aesthetic briefly in my tweens, purchasing a comically wide-brimmed hat and wearing runny winged eyeliner all the time, but the results were predictably disappointing. Though I’ll never have the chutzpah to rock a pixie cut, I can at least take solace in the indie-pop music of the mid-2000s, with its pre-Recession spunk and unabashed penchant for kitsch. And at the top of this heap stands, for me, one album in particular. 

2006’s Let’s Get Out Of This Country was Scottish indie-pop group Camera Obscura’s magnum opus: a zingy, self-possessed ten-track LP of irrepressible twee energy. Camera Obscura is often overshadowed by Belle and Sebastian, the obvious alphas of the Scottish indie scene and a band also formed in 1996. But Camera Obscura deserves its flowers:  Recorded in Sweden with Jari Haapalainen and the Björn of Peter Bjorn and John, Let’s Get Out Of This Country sees the band coming into its own, embracing a sugary, joyous, jangly confection of sparkly guitars and tongue-in-cheek lyricism. 

“Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken,” the LP’s opener and the band’s most famous song, is starry-eyed, dreamy, and endearingly weird. A deliciously dramatic organ refrain bounces into a freewheeling love song, all sparkly drums and simple looping electrics. There’s a fiddle, because of course there’s a fiddle. Tracyanne Campbell, whose voice I’d recognize if I were in a coma, croons like a Sixties pop princess. The song feels something like the great-grandmother of Alvvays’ “Archie, Marry Me,” a track so adulatory it veers precipitously toward self-abnegation. It’s completely kitschy and totally wonderful, a quality that defines the album: the stomp-clap, painfully sincere “Come Back Margaret,” the polka-inflected “The False Contender,” and certainly the album’s finale, “Razzle Dazzle Rose,” an unexpectedly lovely chamber-pop piece full to the brim with horns and sighing nostalgia-dripped lyrics. A favorite of mine is “I Need All The Friends I Can Get,” a twinkly, surprisingly biting track that sounds like a New Girl theme song from a parallel universe.

The LP’s more country-inflected tunes hold a special place in my heart. “Dory Previn,” which has something of Lucinda Williams in it (a bat signal for me), slows the album down and pays homage to the Hollywood songwriter of the same name, the sort of winking inside ball that separates true twee diehards from poseurs. So does “Country Mile,” a pillowy tune that starts like a dirge and ends like an exhalation. It’s more wounded and reticent than most of the album, a texture that makes the LP more interesting. 

And then, of course, there’s the titular track. People overuse the word “infectious,” but “Let’s Get Out Of This Country” belongs in the dictionary definition. A response song to Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ 1986 track “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?”, it’s an homage to UK pop that doubles as an exemplar. Full of joyous escapism, laughing nihilism, and Lee Thomson’s whimsical pop-rock drums, the track is a perfect tableau of the era to come, a weirdly prescient vision of the hipster age before it existed as such. 

Let’s Get Out Of This Country is a lesson in bubblegum indie pop, sweet and sassy and knowing. It’s self-aware without being self-conscious, pleading even as it cartwheels across the room. It’s campy without being scoffed at. It’s what was playing in the room when Zooey Deschanel was born, the soundtrack to the cutting of a pair of extremely blunt bangs. As a precursor of the mid-2010s tweesurgence, the band was perhaps ahead of its time with its third album. Twenty years on, we ought to bask in the silly, sentimental perfection of Let’s Get Out Of This Country, if only for the sheer fun of it.

Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.

Keep scrolling for more great stories.