The Essex Green and Camera Obscura

The Essex Green

Cannibal Sea (Merge)

Camera Obscura

Let's Get Out of This Country (Merge)

Besides being epicenters of their nations' fashion-forward music scenes, Glasgow and Brooklyn share forbidding industrial landscapes of factories, shipyards, and warehouses, decrepit places that foster dreams of blissful afternoons in pastoral meadows and long nights in a lover's embrace. In other words, the very building blocks of quality pop since Elizabethan times. Brooklyn's Essex Green, singer-songwriters Chris Ziter, Sasha Bell, and Jeff Baron, backed by strings, keyboards, and woodwinds, are well aware of urban constraints: "It's hard to hug the girders, my brother. It's hard to swing and waltz," they sing on "Don't Know Why (You Stay)." Instead they've constructed a menagerie of animal references and escape fantasies that encompass acoustic reverie ("Rabbit") and snappy Motown-like bounce ("This Isn't Farm Life"). Scottish troupe Camera Obscura, guided by the irresistible vocals of Tracyanne Campbell, aren't quite as enamored of the great outdoors, quite possibly because they seldom venture outside the bedroom. Deeply romantic and just as melancholy, Let's Get Out of This Country bridges the gap between what the heart wants and what it gets, with Beach Boys harmonies ("Tears for Affairs") and Spectorian strings ("Come Back Margaret"). The inescapable pop shadows of the Shins and Rilo Kiley – minus the latter's caustic lyrics – hover nearby, but no more so than past practitioners, from the Sundays and 10,000 Maniacs to Lush and Madder Rose. Besides, the real shadow lingering underneath these two unabashedly vibrant albums is that tinge of sadness all great pop possesses. (The Essex Green blooms at the Parish, Wednesday, May 10.)

(Essex Green)

(Camera Obscura)