Released: 12/05/23
If, on my first listen to his music, you’d told me that Brian Christinzio Camplight was a Frenchman, I would have replied sarcastically, “Ouais, sans déconner, Sherlock”, for many of his songs evoke – both musically and lyrically – that peculiar, hard-to-define mix of playfulness, ennui and wry existential philosophising that makes Gallic pop music so unlike any other. A certain ‘je ne sais quoi,’ if you will. Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, Anna Karina, Phoenix, Sébastien Tellier, Air, Chilly Gonzales (Canadian, yes, but a Quebecois), Daft Punk, Vanessa Paradis, Jacques Dutronc, Édith Piaf … they all have/had it, and, so does the New Jersey-born, Philadelphia-based Camplight.
And so, as a Francophile, I love The Last Rotation of Earth for the reasons enumerated above; but listening a little closer, it becomes clear that, as with all of Camplight’s previous five albums, the ghost of the Great American Songbook also looms, and in the same way as other luminaries of US indie and alt-pop – Stephin Merritt, Chan Marshall, John Grant, Joanna Newsom, Elliott Smith (RIP), for example – Camplight takes what he needs from the canon to create something startlingly imaginative and fresh. Bravo, Monsieur Camplight, bravo.