A cathartic tale of redemption and renewed hope, brilliantly told.
“I had spent 30 years being terrified to open that door, and afraid of the price I’d pay once I had. I’ve opened the door. To some extent, this album is what was on the other side. I hope it helps me, but this album is also for everyone that is having trouble finding their bravery, finding themselves.”
So runs the album publicity for “A Sober Conversation”, at which point and even before listening, the first thing that strikes you is that no matter what it sounds like, it’s a deeply courageous project. That’s because the album’s twin interlocking central themes are how BC Camplight – the stage name for US-born, Manchester-based singer-song-writer Brian Christinzio – both finally confronted a harrowing childhood trauma that has haunted him for decades, and if that alone wasn’t a challenging enough task, simultaneously turned his back on 20 years of substance abuse.
While processing both those areas in one fell swoop feels like pretty groundbreaking stuff for a single album, in some ways, we actually have been here before. After all, since 2005, Christinzio has been producing a stream of deeply autobiographical LPs that all deal with other personally challenging topics, like the major mental breakdown that was central to “Shortly After Takeoff” (2020) or his “breakup album,” “The Last Rotation Of Earth” (2023).
Each of his seven albums operates, too, on its own well-developed apex between – cue deep breath, hopefully nothing is missing here – prog rock, glam rock, folk, music hall, pop and soul, all of it varnished with intensely theatrical edginess and experimentation, not to mention some wickedly dark humour. Anyway, “A Sober Conversation” is very much a continuation of this idiosyncratic, free-form style and after 20 years or more of chipping away at this quirky but clearly very productive personal coalface, the latest musical material brought to the surface for public viewing might be complex in form, but it’s anything but incoherent in terms of delivery. Furthermore, as a quick check of the size of the venues Christinzio’s playing in the UK this summer confirms, his highly individualized music is finding a very big audience right now, going some way beyond the ‘cult status’ with which some major media outlets are overly fond of labelling any kind of genre-busting, experimental artists.
In any case, with BC Camplight, his relentless, tireless boundary-blurring on his albums isn’t just about the music per se. As he pointed out in a recent interview with Backseatmafia, in his own life, the two key sources of inspiration for “A Sober Conversation” were intimately connected – and that comes out in the lyrics as well.
“You think clarity [from coming off the drugs] will just bring good stuff, right? But it opened up a bag of worms,” he said. “All these awful memories, all these questions. I was just inundated with stuff I hadn’t dealt with in decades.”
When it comes to “A Sober Conversation”, the ‘stuff’ he hadn’t dealt with was when Christinzio was abused by an adult councillor at a New Jersey summer camp in the 1990s, with oblique but hugely sinister sound effects on the opening track, ‘The Tent’, like a canvas flap being unzipped or the crunching of feet across leaves, plunging us straight into the heart of the matter. The power of suggestion of these non-musical sounds heightens the sensation of an unstable, unpredictable environment and that volatilty is reflected in a powerful mix of innocent images and memories, like the child wondering if his shoes are as cool as the other kids and where he’d left his apple sauce, with much more sinister moments like the orders, (presumably from the abuser) to “Face that floor, boy.”
There’s yet more fragmentation in terms of time, too. In ‘The Tent’, the song starts in the present day, where the singer receives some banal recommendations for therapy, presumably to try and cure the mental damage caused by the abuse:
“Have you tried some ashwagandha
Hot milk and chamomile
And cutting out the caffeine
Try changing all your sheets and turning off the TV,”
but then abruptly darts back to the events in the tent. Add in a hugely atmospheric mixture of droning sirens, brief series of notes and the tent flap/crunching leaves sounds which then morphs into a wierdly catchy art pop ballad for the main sequence, and you’ve instantly got yourself a multi-layered, deeply atmospheric piece of music, loaded with possibilities, but fraught with uncertainty.
The next eight tracks very much continue where the opening track left off, just as, at the same time, musically and lyrically, this seventh album itself by BC Camplight links strongly back to his previous output. There are constant changes of style, pace, and a lot of borderline surreal imagery, much of it imagined dialogues. Whether as possible effects of the abuse or not, disphoria, brittle human relations, anger at the past and self-humiliation are all there in one shape or another, and this sense of underlying instability is constantly renewed by the the successive clash of styles on the tracks from the bouncy, singalong feel of ‘Two Legged Dog’, for example, to the jazzy feel to ‘Bubbles in the Gasoline’.
The wry, weary humour that occasionally puts in an appearance is always welcome, but there are some weaker elements here, too: ‘Rock Gently In Disorder’ and ‘Drunk Talk’, the last two tracks before the final instrumental ‘Leaving Camp Four Oaks’ lack the same sense of drive and direction, musically speaking, as the rest of the album. But the determination to challenge the root cause of what happened to Camplight when he was a child doesn’t disappear, either and albeit with two steps forward and one back, there is a sense of stumbling progress throughout the album.
Witness the harrowing but all-out confrontation with the abuser on ‘Where You Taking My Baby’ – a real highpoint in the album – and the the sense of potential closure on ‘Leaving Camp Four Oaks’, where we hear the tent flap being zipped, presumably back into place while the footsteps seem to be fading away. But even if BC Camplight isn’t out of the woods (literally and metaphorically) just yet, at least some kind of redemption or closure feels like a possibility. This, in turn, makes repeated listening to “A Sober Conversation” – and there’s far too much to take in on a single play-through anyway – all the more rewarding.
