LOVE CAMP 7: Press

A strong follow-up to Love Camp 7’s classic 2007 cd Sometimes Always Never, this is aguably their most melodic and straightforward album – a direction from which the band once seemed completely alienated. That was a long time ago. Here the rhythms are as close to four on the floor as Dave Campbell – the closest thing to Elvin Jones that rock has ever seen – has ever done in this unit (he also lends his tropical, soulful beats to Erica Smith & the 99 Cent Dreams). Bassist Bruce Hathaway (also a noted contemporary classical and film composer) is his typical tuneful, melodic self, and it looks as if Steve Antonakos AKA Homeboy Steve, lead guitarist in a million other excellent projects has become a full-fledged member of the band. Frontman/guitarist Dann Baker (also of Erica Smith’s band) plays with characteristic wit and incisiveness, alternating between innumerable tasty shades of jangle and clang. Most of the songs here – including a mini-suite with a Civil War theme – are imbued with historical references in the same vein as the band’s previous cd.

The album opens with a 20-year old song, the Killers, slightly off-kilter film noir-inspired janglerock wherein the victim forgives his murderers since they’re just doing a day’s work. Crazy Bet Van Law kicks off the Civil War section, the tongue-in-cheek tale of an unlikely Union spy, its bridge morphing into a tidy little march. Crazy Bet’s funeral scene is the pretty, sad, harmony-driven Nobody Here but Us African-Americans – it seems she only wanted ex-slaves and servants there. Letting the Brass Band Speak For You is Beatlesque with a slightly Penny Lane feel, a snidely metaphorical slap at conformity and its consequences.

No Negro Shall Smoke is serpentine in the vein of the band’s earlier work, an actual segregationist proclamation from Richmond, Virginia set to herky-jerky, XTC-ish inflections. The way the band just jumps on the word “smoke” and repeats it over and over again rivals the “stone, stone, stone” on Pigs by Pink Floyd. The version of the slightly Arthur Lee-ish Start from Nothing that Baker and Campbell recorded on Erica Smith’s most recent album beats the one here. Arguably the best song here is (Beware of the) Angry Driver (Yeah), a spot-on, deliciously jangly chronicle of road rage, one sadistic city bus driver after another careening through the narrow Brooklyn streets in Williamsburg and Greepoint.

Another highlight is Johnny’s Got a Little Bag of Tricks, a frankly hilarious send-up of masturbatory guitarists everywhere: “He plays a hundred notes where one would do/And if it fits the song that’s ok too.”

Antonakos, who can satirize pretty much anything, gets a couple of bars to show off the kind of chops he never shows off anywhere else (well, maybe in Van Hayride). Bobbing and weaving, Lady Ottoline Morrell is a vividly clanging tribute to a Bloomsbury-era patron of the arts. You’ll see this cd on our Best Albums of 2009 list in December. Love Camp 7 play Southpaw on May 20 at around 8:30.

Promising to perform compositions from records 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, Love Camp 7 returns to the Parkside Lounge celebrating the release of their latest CD, UNION GARAGE. Guitarists Dann Baker and Stephen B. Antonakos, bass player Bruce Hathaway, and drummer Dave Campbell have come up with another infectious collection of hyperintelligent flower-power psychedelia featuring lilting harmonies, wry lyrics, and jangling guitars. The centerpiece of the new disc is a sweet suite of songs dealing with race, slavery, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement, primarily set in Richmond, Virginia, consisting of "Crazy Bet Van Lew," "Nobody Here But Us African-Americans," "Letting the Brass Band Speak for You," and "No Negro Shall Smoke..." An absolutely delightful chorus drives "(Beware of the) Angry Driver (Yeah)," one of the best songs ever about New York City mass transit - "Here Comes the B48," Baker sings. "Tell me where on earth you'd rather be / than Greenpoint in its glory." Things get a little crazy during "Johnny's Got a Little Bag o' Tricks," including a fab drum solo during a Mountain-style jam. And the album closer, "Mock On," while seemingly an ironic alternative to Van Morrison's "Rave on, John Donne," is actually set to the words of a William Blake poem. On the opening track, Baker declares, "The killers aren't bad guys." Love Camp 7 ain't bad guys, either. LC7 will be hitting the Parkside stage at 10:00, followed by the Shaker Pegs and Rawles Balls.

The house was full by the time the band went on. There were a couple of tables full of yuppie puppies from Westchester or Connecticut, loud and oblivious as if they were on lunch break at middle school (even if that was ten years ago for them). It took Love Camp 7 about five minutes to clear them out of the room, opening up some space for the cool kids to sit. Love Camp 7 played interludes all night, an endless series of hooks, riffs and intricate guitar figures that rushed by, a whirlwind of beautiful, jangling, twanging, wailing melody. Their songs don’t follow any predictable pattern. Each is a winding back street through a casbah of the mind where every turn could be a dead end but always leads somewhere unexpected. Yet the songs are anything but random. Love Camp’s not-so-secret weapon, in full force tonight, is drummer Dave Campbell, one of the two or three finest in all of rock. He led his bandmates, redoubtable bassist Bruce Hathaway and frontman/guitarist Dann Baker (who also plays with Campbell in Erica Smith’s band) through one tricky change after another, through minefields of weird time signatures and abrupt endings. In the end, everybody emerged exhausted but unscathed.
To read the rest, go to website

On their fifth album, unsigned Brooklyn indie-rock intellectuals Love Camp 7 offer up a quirky little slice of life with a cast of characters from the group’s collective and individual lives. Populated by figures encountered in the flesh, in newspapers and yellow-paged tomes alike, Sometimes, Always, Never is chock full of odd, relatively unheard of references that will send listeners scurrying towards Wikipedia to discover who the band was talking about. The forgotten lore of neo-folk heroes who otherwise may have been left to the page margins of high-brow, liberal, cocktail party-level obscurity, were it not for Love Camp 7’s name dropping, is ever-present on the disc.
See website for entire review

The brilliantly eccentric Brooklyn band Love Camp 7 are rooted in the 1960s
pop operas of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Who, and the Kinks. On
SOMETIMES, ALWAYS, NEVER their songs hymn the lives of unsung heroes,
forgotten eccentrics, and minor personalities of American popular history,
such as the lesbian oil heiress who ruled her own Bahaman island, a
principled politician, and a courageous telephone operator. Their music is a
blend of neo-psychedelia and vintage rock & roll, as packed with surprising
twists and turns as with sly references to the sounds of yesteryear.

--Muze, Inc.

Their great shining moment. There will assuredly be others, considering how good the unreleased material that they’ve been playing live has been, but this is their best album to date. It’s a triumph of soaring harmonies, catchy hooks and general fearlessness for these authentic 60s psychedelic throwbacks. Rich with catchy melodies, steeped in history, the album gets better with repeated listenings, in the spirit of great psychedelic, garage and art-rock bands from the Pretty Things, to Nektar, to the Kinks.
Go to website to read entire review

Named after a cheesy 1969 women-in-a-Nazi-prison flick, New York-based Love Camp 7 makes jangly sixties-era feel-good pop, albeit with a surprisingly subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — political edge.
Go to website for entire review

Love Camp 7's Sometimes, Always, Never documents the gorgeous, smart, harmonic, psychedelically gift-wrapped songs the band used to play before their current engrossment with the very exciting alt.Beatle-Baker project - which I hear they are recording now. Remember the moving and unique water trilogy? The happy Mr. Elephant? Or Barbara Lee (who is having no trouble sleeping)? Buy the album and take this genus band's Wonka-rock trip anytime you want to.

"Remember how you felt the first time you heard Robyn Hitchcock's Fegmania? This is a thrill of that order . . . pied pipers of post-punk pop leading us back to our imagined childhood."

"What makes listening to . . . Baker . . . and his longtime bandmates . . . Hathaway . . . and . . . Campbell . . . such a wild, fun-filled ride is that the guys refuse to take sides, finally, between the good memories and the bad. The band's music . . . is a sometimes delicate, sometimes not-so-delicate balance of extremes, from sweetly crafted ballads and bright Beatley pop . . . to the tense, angular phrasings of progressive rock and modern jazz. And it's all somehow pulled miraculously together by an insistent, psych-rock inventiveness that, for all the band's musical nostalgia, owes more to the loft studio than the garage.

For all their formal complexity, most of the songs on Vacation Village sound surprisingly simple and direct. The trio of Baker, Campbell, and Hathaway negotiates even the jerkiest rhythms and most abrupt time shifts with ease, pulling all the sounds and influences together with such apparent effortlessness that it's easy to miss just how rich and challenging most ot these songs are. What you will hear clearly, though, is just how gifted and seamless a unit the trio has become over the years.

"Dann Baker and Love Camp 7 have made the rare record that pursues and thoroughly captures the spirit, if not the sound, of post-Pet Sounds Brian Wilson. Here you have the daydreams of adults who never aged past seventeen, and who refuse to denude their shirts of buttons proclaiming their heroes' names (Frank Zappa, and artist Arny Geller, who designed the Beach Boys' Wild Honey cover). They assign cutesy song titles, but their songs, like "Not Cool Enough for Daryl Genis's Party", fully capture the fragile, awkward moments of adolescence with honesty and love. If you're a big fan of the Beach Boys circa 1968-75, you'll love this. My personal favorite, "We Ended Up Talking All Night at Ben Frank's", is a great song to slip between Adult Rodeo's "Jesus, He Loves P.C.P. and Me" on compilation tapes for your friends.

If you aren't acquainted with Love Camp 7, you'll see my footprints still fresh on that same sand. Follow them, and you'll find yourself in a record store, browsing through the section in which Love Camp 7's previous, highly acclaimed albums wait to be discovered. As the group provides one of the most interesting and genuine voices on the culture of adolescence -- a subject few music lovers don't adore -- it's hard not to hear Vacation Village without making Love Camp 7 your latest semi-obscure musical obsession. I haven't invested in their back catalog yet, but I have to assume from Vacation Village that previous reviewers have been correct, and that Love Camp 7 are one of America's most neglected treasures."

"Live in Las Vegas is a pop-psychedelic masterpiece."

"One of the top five albums of 1995."

"Achieves a rare level of excitement . . . a melting pot of styles, yet free of any cliches, a quality that makes it almost impossible to do the Love Camp 7 sound justice in only a few sentences."

"The best cd of the month . . . under the dense and tangled sound is concealed a rich core that turns each of these 14 songs into a small jewel."

"One of the 5 most underrated bands in world history."

"This literate Brooklyn group . . . have a keenly developed sense of interplay, and their collaborative material could have been arrived at in no other manner. With all three core members singing — often in carefully arranged harmonies — Love Camp 7 presents a friendly sheen that stands in contrast to the quirky turns in the music and the peculiar lyrics. They can rock out when they want to, and they want to on most songs — but only for a little while, then they abruptly change direction. They're like a big funny guy who unexpectedly asks to borrow your eyeglasses. Confidently loopy without being comical and arty without being arch, Love Camp 7 comes up with either the oddest hooks or the hookiest oddities. And they occasionally turn the guitars up real loud.

"Easily the best psych-pop band in America today."

"Love Camp 7's crafty, rhythmic flights go where few have bothered to take rock's bass/drums/guitar/vocal thing before. Their style is quirky . . . and arty . . . but not overindulgent . . . a disjointed, cataclysmic marriage of rhythms and textures that righteously rallies by in the fast lane of avant-garage musicality."

"When the wide-branching rhythm of language is made into music, when bands take the effort to think of each sentence in musical terms, then the result is either unlistenable art noise, or a rich, blooming musical cosmos, as is the case with Love Camp 7.

"Neil Young on dust."

"A musically adept Pussy Galore crossed with a Satanic Majesties-era Rolling Stones."

"LC7 works with dissonance and achieves beauty, not easy to do in the pop genre."