I’m always a sucker for the emotional stuff. After a lifetime membership of the strict Northern ‘Winter is Coming’ Emotion Bottling Up club, I can now only experience human feelings through songs, films and TV cooking shows, so I’m constantly on the lookout for more. More heartbreak, more emptiness, more crushing defeat.
Which brings me to Camp Cope.
So enjoyable and cathartic is this record, that I can’t seem to concentrate on anything else. I’m having to listen to something else right now just to write about it, otherwise I get locked in and start staring into the middle distance, stuck deep in my own failed dreams.
Run, dreams, run!
I stumbled across this album just by scrolling through Bandcamp albums tagged with my new hometown, Melbourne. Mainly known for its vegan pies, rain and funny football men in short shorts, Melbourne also has a knack for pumping out the best guitar-pop you’ve never heard. I stopped dead on this Camp Cope record thinking I’d found a hidden gem, and for a few minutes I had it all to myself. A quick google later, and I found out how wrong I was. Everyone fucking loves them, don’t they. A national tour, a Rolling Stone Australia session. And just like that, my indie-points disappeared. But it was too late, I’d been hit hard.
“There was a man in the park and he was lying down, and he could’ve been dead but just like everybody, I kept on walking”
It’s easy to do sad though, any idiot can write a sad song – ask Adele – the hard part is giving you hope that the song won’t stay sad. Singer, main songwriter and REGISTERED FUCKING NURSE, Georgia Maq nails it on every occasion, sometimes even just through sheer force. If the fuzzy drums and shit-tonne of fuck-yeah basslines don’t pull you in, the passion of delivery will.
Even on the slow songs like West Side Story, about living, working and being heartbroken in the notoriously grim western Melbourne suburb of Footscray (I went there recently, it was no Blackpool, but point taken), the switch from nostalgia to urgency is kinda breathtaking, and you get it. I do, anyway (and FYI – dropping a Why? reference is always going to win me over).
And for those of us that want to hope that maybe everything doesn’t have to be shit forever, there’s an atmosphere of dissent that seeps into every line. Not in that horrible on-the-nose Billy Bragg/Frank Turner way, but more subtle, funny and heartbreaking, with throwaway lines that leave you a bit off-balanced.
“They say take it as a compliment, they’re only being nice,
And you carry keys between your knuckles as you walk alone at night”
I think that’s what I like most about Camp Cope (y’know, apart from the kinship of one broken healthcare worker to another) – the constant switch between personal and protest, heartache and anger, and all the while feeling completely and utterly helpless. I want to wallow in this shit, it all feels so good.
“I hope you know where you are, I hope you feel like you’ve gotten far,
and maybe you were told you were special one too many times and now you’re lost”
Remember when you were young and had dreams of future achievements? No, well, neither do Camp Cope.
Remember when that dipshit at work said that she brought it on herself by what she was wearing and you wanted to smash his head in? Yeah, so do Camp Cope.
Remember when for a few moments in a sea of shit, you were able to grab hold of hope and feel like everything might be ok? Yeah, I think that might be Camp Cope.
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Camp Cope is out now on Bandcamp and LPs are available through Poison City Records.