What’s most startling about this Melbourne, Australia trio Camp Cope’s self-titled debut is not its collection of tightly played and written indie rock songs. It’s the sneaking, sinking feeling you get from pouring through someone’s well-hidden diary while listening to the damn thing.
In the record’s eight tracks, singer Georgia Maq lets us in far past the point of oversharing; her frustration, fear and grief expressed in “Lost (Season One)” and “Song for Charlie,” delivered through her thick Aussie accent and complemented by her bandmates’ ragtag percussion, it all feels like the kind of things we learn to keep locked up in private. You could call that radical transparency, or tenderness, or both. But it makes for startlingly good singalong fodder. Particularly impressive is Maq’s pen. Her knack for reworking lengthy, unwieldy thoughts like “I’ve been desensitized to the human body / I could look at you naked and all I’d see would be anatomy” (“Flesh and Electricity”) into effortless hooks is demonstrated all across Camp Cope, through songs that tackle sexual harassment, personal tragedy. But through its heavy subject matter, Camp Cope’s inaugural statement of a debut album is, above the mud and murk, to persist and survive
The Fat Angel Sings 