FEATURE:
Revisiting…
BC Camplight - The Last Rotation of Earth
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I am looking back…
PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Laurence
on some albums from this year that rank alongside the very best - but may not have been as played and dissected as much as they deserved. Those that warrant a place on most of the ‘best albums of 2023’ lists. An artist that very much is worthy of that honour is BC Camplight. Brian Christinzio is a New Jersey-born, Manchester-based artist who released his sixth studio album in May. One that I felt should have been nominated for a Mercury Prize – as someone who has resided in the U.K. for a long time now, I think that he is eligible -, everyone needs to check out this album. Three years after the superb Shortly After Takeoff, The Last Rotation of Earth offers similar brilliance. Another nine-track album packed with incredible moments and his distinct sound; I will wrap up with a couple of reviews for one of this year’s best albums. Before getting to some others interviews, I want to start with MOJO. It begins really interestingly. A moment when BC Camplight (I shall refer to him by his artist name and not Brian Christinzio) was preparing to be really open and real:
“How warty does MOJO like to go?” asks Brian Christinzio. “Because my story is pretty warty.”
For instance, there’s the state he was in in 2012. The New Jersey-born singer and songwriter (“don’t say ‘singer-songwriter’, that makes me think of James Taylor on a stool and I’m not that guy”) was squatting an abandoned church in Philadelphia, siphoning electricity from neighbours and selling equipment that he’d borrowed off friends. “I was an absolute scumbag,” he says, staring down at his coffee. “I was drinking, doing way too many drugs, losing friends and feeling angry and bitter.”
On two albums as BC Camplight, Christinzio’s elegant and eloquent piano-based pop – equal parts Brian Wilson, Harry Nilsson and Lou Christie – had been met by critical bouquets but demoralising sales. Beset by an anxiety disorder, he reckoned he’d already “blown it”. Adding insult to perceived injury, he’d played piano on Sharon Van Etten’s album Epic and seen members of his live band, Dave Hartley (bass) and Robbie Bennett (keys), join The War On Drugs, both local favourites blowing up with the success he’d anticipated for himself.
“I was seething!” he says. “And mad at myself, like, What are you doing? Do something, or you’re going to drop to the bottom of the ocean. And if you stay in Philly, you die, or go to jail.”
Christinzio roused himself to ask his Facebook followers if anyone knew of a flat in London he could escape to. “I’d fucked up so much, I was running away,” he sighs. A journalist friend stepped in to offer refuge in Manchester instead, and four days later Christinzio was outside the Castle Hotel pub-cum-venue in the city’s Northern Quarter to pick up keys. Eleven years later, he’s still here. “Manchester represented a life,” he adds. “A place that meant that the old Brian was dead.”
The ‘old Brian may be gone, but the ‘new’ Brian remains feisty and opinionated. Christinzio, now 43, meets MOJO at Manchester Piccadilly station, and walking through the concourse he spies a piano for members of the public to play. “There’s something so immediate and romantic about the piano,” he starts. “So, when I see people pounding on it, it makes me ill. It’s an instrument. You wouldn’t leave a dentist’s drill lying around in the middle of a train station. Playing bad music in front of people is just as dangerous.”
What first drew me to Manchester was the shit weather. It brings everyone down to my level.
Settling down to a full English fry-up at the Koffee Pot on Oldham Street – where he once washed dishes to make ends meet – Christinzio visibly relaxes, and begins to wax lyrical about his adopted home city.
“What first drew me to Manchester was the shit weather,” he says, “because it brings everyone down to my level. I remember walking down this street; I didn’t have five pounds in my pocket but I had the energy of new friends in a new city, and writing all this new music, which hadn’t happened in ages. What a relief that was. Anyway, I consider myself Mancunian now. I never felt American anyway, but more like an alien.”
Christinzio looks more like a bear than an alien, dressed in black except for a rust-coloured beanie with tufts of black hair escaping out the back. He’s jovial and garrulous, but it masks a history of unease. Young Brian would look at photos of family members and fret about when they would die. At the same time, he was obsessed with Jerry Lee Lewis, discovered in his mother’s record collection and encouraging him to stick with piano lessons (Frankie Valli and other high voices were a similar influence on his own).
Christinzio’s anxieties abated in high school – “I was captain of the football team, and my girlfriend was prom queen” – but exploded right after, “like a switch had been flipped.” Suffering overwhelming bouts of hypochondria and neurological disorders, he was hospitalised several times. A thyroid-related auto-immune condition has been diagnosed, but medication hasn’t worked. “It’s all just a big, muddy ball,” he sighs”.
Skipping to an interview with Silent Radio, they highlight how the music on The Last Rotation of Earth emerged from more than the triumph over adversity. It is a far less predictable and richer listen than that. His first album as a single man. His other albums were very much done with his other half providing inspiration and support. Maybe a strange experience creating The Last Rotation of Earth:
“Your lyrics were really direct on ‘Shortly After Takeoff’ and on this one even more so. Do you still feel that’s important, as I think a lot of people hide behind similes and metaphors and don’t say what they mean?
Well, I stopped doing that, so much so, that in one of my songs I start yelling at myself in the song for using similes!” (on the brilliant ‘It Never Rains In Manchester’). “Right, I’ll preface this by saying, I don’t give a fuck about what anybody thinks about my music” he laughs. “I’m glad that people like it, and when people do like it, they seem to be drawn to the directness of it, and I have noticed that. I, in turn, started to become more drawn to my own music, the more direct I was. When you make a song, I like to give each one of my songs its own little brain, its own little artificial intelligence, so when you create one of these songs, for me, it’s kind of a little living thing. I like making that little thing able to communicate in a way that it communicates with me, it communicates with the listener. I noticed on a few records back, the more I was trying to be clever, it was losing me, it was losing other people as well. So I thought stop being clever, teach these songs how to talk, and let them talk. People don’t listen to music cos they want to figure out a fucking verbal Sudoku puzzle! It’s like, they want to be spoken to, and felt heard, and that’s what I try to do with my music now. I just don’t have the time or the patience to be writing these awful deep metaphors and stuff, it’s just not what I do.”
This sixth album, the hugely anticipated follow up to ‘Shortly After Takeoff’ was shaping up to be a very different beast entirely. There was one problem though “It wasn’t very good.” Brian reveals. “I was terrified. If there was one good thing to come out of this break-up, it’s that my music doesn’t suck”! he laughs. “I was doing this album, and I don’t think it was as good as ‘Shortly After Takeoff’, I was like ‘fuck, I’m finally slipping backwards’. I was convincing myself ‘no, no, it’s good, it’s good’ and there was this voice in the back of my head going ‘it’s not as good’. I had a good day in the studio one day, I was feeling a little bit better about it, and came in, and then my partner handed me a glass of wine, and I saw that she was crying and I thought ‘uh-oh’, and then she left. Then I looked at that piece of shit record that I had been doing and was like ‘you’re leaving, you’re done!’ About ninety-five percent of it I just tossed, and then within two months I’d made ‘Last Rotation Of Earth’ from start to finish. It’s my stupid brain! There’s always a log jam and I have to have something to shake it loose and usually that something isn’t very pleasant!”
‘Last Rotation Of Earth’ feels like the album he should have made. It’s the perfect follow up to ‘Shortly After Takeoff’ which was supposedly the end of the ‘Manchester Trilogy’ as BC christened the three albums made since moving here in 2012 with’ How To Die In The North’, and ‘Deportation Blues’, preceding ‘Shortly After Takeoff’. The new album still retains a distinct Mancunian flavour running through its core with lines such as “I was struck by lightning when I was fourteen but I’ve been fucking mint since” from the the aptly titled ‘It Never Rains In Manchester’. However Brian is quick to play down the thought that this is now a quadrilogy of Manc themed albums. ”It’s not as catchy is it? Quadrilogy. You know, I’m always honest. I only thought of the Manchester trilogy as a way to sell the last record” Brian jokes. “I thought ’well, these are the three records I’ve made in Manchester, let’s call it a trilogy’ I didn’t really set out to do it, it wasn’t Star Wars! This is definitely a totally separate animal. In some ways it’s less about my journey here in Manchester and all that stuff, and I feel it’s more about telling a story about another person, and some of the themes are, I think, a little bit more universal. To me, it feels different, and it’s the first album I’ve done in ten years, without the missus. So, those felt like the albums I did with her, I mean she didn’t do anything with the music, but they wouldn’t exist without her, she was kind of like my backbone, so this is the first thing I did on my own, so it doesn’t feel part of those at all”.
Prior to coming to some reviews for the brilliant The Last Rotation of Earth, I am going to bring in another interview. The Skinny spoke with an artist who performs a difficult trick: mixing humour and funny lyrics among direct and painful lines. Able to pull it off without the music being jarring or there being this uncomfortable blend and insincerity:
“Since relocating from Philadelphia to Manchester in what he describes as a lifesaving move, he has released a string of sparkling alt-pop albums, each one blighted by misfortune. He was deported from the UK two days before the release of 2015’s How to Die in the North; his father died days before the release of 2018’s Deportation Blues; 2020’s Shortly After Takeoff was released in the first month of lockdown.
That The Last Rotation of Earth is also defined by personal turmoil, then, seems to place it in the same tradition, although Christinzio sees this album as a substantial departure from his previous work. Like its predecessors, it contains several references to his beloved Manchester (Albert Square, the curry mile), but here the themes are more internalised and therefore more universal. What does remain, though, is his characteristic ability to throw in seemingly mundane everyday references, with Homes Under the Hammer and Faith No More among the pop culture potpourri getting a mention this time around.
“It’s just a device that I really enjoy,” Christinzio explains. “It puts the listener in a specific place. It’s a reminder that you’re listening to a person going through something, and I’m not trying to be Bill Shakespeare.”
Few songwriters of his generation sprinkle laugh-out-loud lyrics into their songs so successfully, especially while walking the tightrope of maintaining such heavy subject matter at the same time. “Music is just the instrument my brain uses to get its thoughts out,” is his typically self-effacing explanation for that. “You have to be mindful that you can’t just dump 3000 pounds of awful feelings onto people all at once. I enjoy having a reprieve and letting people breathe and reset. It’s more human; humans are very complicated people, and I think some people appreciate music that reflects the complexities of just how weird our brains are.”
Something else that sets The Last Rotation of Earth apart from his previous work is the expansiveness of its sonic palette; tracks like The Movie and Fear Life in a Dozen Years are positively cinematic in their scope, with members of the Liverpool Philharmonic being brought in to add grandeur to Christinzio’s arrangements (“I think I was just trying to convince one of these fucking music supervisors to let me do a film”). The album closes, meanwhile, on a disarmingly uncertain note with the drifting two-minute instrumental The Mourning.
“One thing that I don’t like about some musicians is that they assume that they have answers to things,” he explains. “I just want to be honest with people, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, and I don’t know how any of this is going to turn out, but this is what I have to say, and I hope you come along for the ride”.
I am going to come to The Skinny again. Big fans of BC Camplight’s work, they were full of praise for the majestic The Last Rotation of Earth. An album that did not get the coverage and expansive airplay I feel that it warrants. Maybe it would not trouble its author, yet so many fans would say there are many songs not played or known about:
“Brian Christinzio has been a writer reborn since, on a whim, he swapped Philadelphia for Manchester a decade ago, an act of desperation intended to put clear blue water between himself and the self-destructive tendencies that were engulfing him in his hometown. He’s found plenty more strife waiting for him on the other side of the pond since, but has always found a way to mine it for material, with his experiences of mental illness, deportation and loss coming to inform his Manchester Trilogy of How to Die in the North, Deportation Blues and Shortly After Takeoff.
Now, heartbreak has entered the picture; just 18 months after a triumphant adopted hometown show at Manchester’s Ritz that saw a crown-wearing Christinzio strut across the stage covering Prefab Sprout’s The King of Rock 'N' Roll, The Last Rotation of Earth sees him dethroned, rambling around Manchester in a haze after the collapse of a long-term relationship. He works his way through the pain in highly idiosyncratic fashion, exchanging niceties with a concerned Tesco cashier on the title track, chronicling the mundanities of the split on She’s Gone Cold, and uproariously finding gallows humour in it on the epic, sweeping The Movie ('Couldn’t you have done this three weeks ago? / Before I spent a million pounds on your air fryer?')
There is nobody quite like Christinzio, who finds room for brooding art rock (Fear Life In a Dozen Years), glorious melodramatic balladry (Going Out On a Low Note) and descents into impressionistic weirdness (It Never Rains In Manchester). His lyrics, meanwhile, imbue resounding sadness with rapier wit. On Twitter, Christinzio has repeatedly suggested this might be his last album. Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde is on the record as saying he wants to release Christinzio’s music forever. On the basis of The Last Rotation of Earth, pray that the former Cocteau Twin gets his way”.
Let’s round off with another really positive review for The Last Rotation of Earth. Loud and Quiet awarded it nine-out-of-ten when they spent time with it. A masterful songwriter and distinct voice in the musical landscape, it will be interesting to hear the next BC Camplight album. Make sure that you check out his current one. Such an accomplished, funny and open album from the Manchester-based legend:
“Brian Christinzio’s bad luck is legendary. If you thought things would be looking up for the Manchester-based Philadelphian songwriter’s 2020 album as BC Camplight, Shortly After Takeoff; written on the back of a deeply traumatic battle with the Home Office, followed in close succession by the death of his father, then you’d be wrong. If that record deals with the aftermath of being cruelly ripped from a home, then The Last Rotation of Earth, deals more with the wreckage of a relationship, detailing the slow, emotional end of a nine-year relationship, amid a backdrop of addiction struggles and mental anguish.
It’s not going to shock you then when I say that The Last Rotation of Earth is pretty bleak in its themes and motifs. Each song glides past like pictures in a scrapbook detailing the downward spiral of a love affair, with lyrics that feel like overheard snippets of bitter arguments and heartbroken reflections into a bathroom mirror. However, Christinzio, always the eager-to-please performer at heart, can’t resist finding the humour in the wreckage. The record is peppered with odd little vignettes that manage to capture the mundane ridiculousness of it all. Arguments with his significant other on how to correctly pronounce Theroux, sit next to sudden, depressing revelations that come when you find yourself watching David Dickinson in a fleabag hotel.
But, as the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And this is pretty incredible lemonade. The subject matter might be dark, but the melodies make this pure, hook-laden pop. Finding influences from the last 60 years of popular music, every song honestly feels like its own self-contained masterpiece. From the luxurious, Talk Talk-style sophisti-pop of ‘Kicking Up a Fuss’ to the lush, orchestrated strings and soaring emotional arrangements of ‘Going Out On A Low Note’ and the scene hopping audio-verité of ‘The Movie’, every track seems to fizz and glisten with uncontrolled creativity.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about The Last Rotation of Earth, though, is just how emotionally honest it is. This isn’t a story about redemption, or someone finding a new lease of life. No, like the aftermath of most relationships, this is a record about coming to terms with feeling shitty and trying to move on. Dodging any clumsy attempt at closure, instead the album elects to just fade out with a song called ‘The Mourning’. A quiet requiem, the ghostly piano and haunting string encapsulate both a crushing sense of despair and a need to move on. It’s a feeling that anyone who’s ever been jilted, ghosted, or unceremoniously dumped will know intimately. Most of the time, it’s all you have to cling on to”.
You can buy The Last Rotation of Earth here. I feel that there should be so much love aimed at this album. There is, though, from such a mighty talent, some sites missed out providing their opinions on an album that sits comfortably among this year’s very best. The Last Rotation of Earth is unforgettable. Maybe you have not heard it since it came out in May. If that is the case then do make sure that you…
HAVE another listen.