Cameras "In Your Room"

Manimal, 2012

Ready for their close-up

• Artful Aussie Indie rockers Cameras concoct a deeply atmospheric and often touching ambience on this hugely impressive debut, having spent recent months on tour with Roxy Music and building a sturdy live reputation at home.

• One of the keys to their sonic strength is in the separate scope and variety that both lead singers and songwriters bring to the mix. Eleanor Dunlop’s entries impress most and are mainly piano-led, enticingly spooky, wistful; full of ambiguity and slowly unveiling unexpected melodic wonder and unexpected chordal reaches.

  Opener ‘Polarise’ sets the stall out pretty perfectly with five minutes of brooding beauty and menace. Her ‘Break/Hands’ is another triumph of noise, melody and pain, but the weighty atmosphere of ‘June’ with its sly modern rock-meets-Kate Bush piano ballad could be the high melancholy water-mark. Elsewhere Fraser Harvey’s contributions, in particular the impressive ‘Kreuzberg’, ‘Patience, It Was The Truth’ and ‘Defeatist’ (with its emotional brick wall opening of “I, I want you to stay…..far away”) are denser, louder, taut and definitely have the icy cool core of Interpol, and occasionally Berlin-era Bowie, in the sonic blueprint, with their blankly cold emotion and gorgeously reverb-heavy guitars.

  ‘I Know’ seems to be the point where the brooding rock and the wistful left field balladeering meet to pummelling effect, and along with ‘End of this Line’ they almost reach transcendence, but without a drop in tensely coiled pace or quality. This album is chock-full of deliciously brooding atmosphere and purposeful melodic turns, and while some of the influences still show at the minute, the moments of reference never stops ‘In Your Room’ being a weighty triumph of a debut. It’s an absolute joy to sink your senses into head-first.