Zoë Strickland | Editor-in-Chief
“Tracyanne & Danny” is the perfect album for a calm summer’s day. The songs are dreamy, carefree and border on sounding old fashioned. Though listening to the entire album at once may make listener’s eyes heavy, the duo has a select number of tracks that pick up the beat. While the album is good, I don’t think I’ll be listening to it in its entirety again. Rather, I’ll add a few songs to my listening library and move on.
“Tracyanne & Danny” is the first album from Camera Obscura frontwoman Tracyanne Campbell and Crybaby’s Danny Coughlan. The duo presents a sound that listeners of each individual artist’s other work would expect; Campbell’s unique vocals join with Coughlan’s overall calm musical stylings to create a beautifully retro-sounding array of tunes.
Though most of the album has a more relaxed sound to it, tracks like “Alabama” and “Cellophane Girl” bring up the tempo.
“O’Keefe” is my personal favorite song on the record. A duet with the slow percussion, piano and harmonica make the track sound bittersweet — like it should play during a break-up scene of a foreign romantic film.
While Tracyanne & Danny is a collaborative project, Campbell and Coughlan work as separate entities — individual songs are primarily sung by one artist or the other, with the opposite adding in backing vocals. By doing this, the artists give each other space on the album to embrace their own sounds. For Campbell, this means songs like “Alabama,” which could be something straight from Camera Obscura’s discography. For Coughlan, this means his slower, dreamy, acoustic sounds, like those found in “Deep in the Night.”
“Tracyanne & Danny” is the perfect album for fans of Campbell and Coughlan’s other musical ventures, or for people who enjoy She & Him and Elizabeth & the Catapult.
Contact the author at journaleditor@wou.edu
Photo courtesy of: www.tracyanneanddanny.com
