BC Camplight - Shortly After Takeoff

The Guardian 100

(Bella Union)
Brian Christinzio distills beauty from pain and allows melodies and hooks to hang around on this triumphant album

Brian Christinzio’s fifth album as BC Camplight is a marvel, in which currents cut across each other in a half hour or so that roils with anxiety, stuns with beauty and, occasionally, provokes laughter. The whole uneasy tone – is it wrong to take so much pleasure in something so plainly the result of turmoil – is set with the opening to the second track, Ghosthunting, in which Christinzio delivers a parody standup routine to bilious audience laughter: “For the whole first half of this record, I thought I had a really bad disease. It turns out I’m just mentally ill. I called an attorney to get my affairs in order and everything. He said, ‘You know I’m a personal injury lawyer, right?’ He asked me, ‘Have you fallen?’ I said, ‘Boy have I ever.’”