Before her amicable split with Belle & Sebastian in 2002, cellist-vocalist Isobel Campbell recorded two albums with her side project, The Gentle Waves. Amorino, her first true solo album, is the kind of record you fall hard and fast for. Campbell’s beautiful whispers grace the inventive songs, along with simple, poetic lyrics that explore the intense ups, downs, joys and sorrows of love, providing a common thread that ties the musically eclectic album together. She slides in and out of moods, sounds, styles and textures with a delicate ease. There’s swingin’ ’60s psychedlic folk-pop, heavy on baroque and classical influences; Bossa Nova-inspired indie jazz-pop with an experimental bent; Spanish-flavored trumpet flourishes and faint, galloping percussion.
The title track opens the album with a mix of French and English lyrics, hypnotic flute, reserved brass, tremelo guitar and harpsichord. “The Breeze Whispered Your Name,” is a tale of a hopeless soul who has the unexpected chance to be redeemed by love, but still hesitates. The words seem stripped from an old jazz standard—“I never thought love would ever find me … and then / The breeze whispered your name.” Musically, the song would be as comfortable on Van Morrison’s Moondance as a Nick Drake or Astrud Gilberto album. On much of Amorino, Campbell’s voice sounds like a more fragile version of the latter.
After a strange intro of ancient piano and a creepy AM-radio voiceover that sounds as if its traveling in waves through time, “The Cat’s Pyjamas” erupts into a full-on Ragtime Jazz romp. It’s the kind of music Jay Gatsby would have had pumping at his late-night West-Egg shindigs. And Campbell croons her playful lyrics over the festive sounds.
As “Song For Baby” does later in the album, “Johnny Come Home” turns back to the Brazilian Bossa Nova of “The Breeze.” It’s a sad, withdrawn, yet delicate song of regret and longing—pondering an intense love lost with a quiet, painful sigh (“Words came, violently filling up the room / Lovers have their own private moon / To taste the honey we must taste blood / a poisoned nectar / If we were on fire why did we grow so tired?”). Though the music is almost hopeful, by song’s end the listener has yet to discover whether the singer’s love returns. It’s not until two songs later, amidst the Christmassy ’60s-pop of “Love For Tomorrow”—complete with horns, bells, flute and orchestra—that we discover her love does return. But reality has set in and she is more guarded (“you come to me offering a rainbow … But now we must be wise / We have both been burnt here”). Still, she is willing to take him back.
Leaning heavily toward the aforementioned symphonic influences, “This Land Flows With Milk” is magical, fairy-tale dream-pop laced with haunting trills from an elegantly orchestrated string section. It’s a song of transition, evoking images of falling leaves bursting with color—reds like blood, burning oranges like fire, shimmering gold and crumbling brown—tossed haphazardly in the chill breeze as pretty piano keys twinkle into the hopeful autumn air.
Campbell wraps up Amorino with a foray into the California country and folk of the mid- to late-’60s, filtering the vibe of Byrds classics like “Wasn’t Born To Follow” and “Ballad of Easy Rider” through her unique vision for the album. With “Time Is Just The Same,” she leaves listeners feeling the tension between being deeply in love and following your personal dreams at the expense of this love—“Just when I think I understand / Here comes the chaos to surround us … When you’re tired of chasing rainbows / Just look me up or say my name.”
Amorino is a tender portrait of the strange intricacies of love and music—two seemingly unrelated intangibles Campbell wraps endlessly around each other. The portrait she paints is true-to-life with no neat and tidy conclusions. Yet her tone, though often sorrowful, is always permeated by a sense of hope and punctuated with a beautiful melody that makes you long for the next feeling or experience—whatever it might bring.