Description
Isobel Campbell is no stranger to navigating turmoil. On her previous album, There Is No
Other (2020), she re-emerged after a decade of label trouble with a gem of subtly
questing psychedelic folk. Four years on, Campbell spreads her net wider on Bow to
Love, a soft-spun yet sharp-edged set of reflections on modern crises that doesn't stop at
diagnosing the problems: it goes further to ask how we might progress from our tense,
conflicted times.
With all the dexterity the Glasgow-born singer-songwriter and cellist is known for, the
result is an album of lambent surfaces and choppy riptides, a deeply personal record for
today poised between hope and despair. "The album is about what we're all in right
now, and my response to that and my life as a microcosm within that," says Campbell,
before suggesting how exposing modern horrors might prove purgative. "I think there's
a quote from A Course In Miracles which says, 'Love brings up everything unlike itself
for the purpose of healing and release.' Maybe these horrible things are coming up and
out so we can get rid of them and things can be better."
Her radar keenly attuned to inequities, Campbell spotlights toxic masculinity on the
luminous 'Everything Falls Apart,' it's circling lilt and warm, fretless bass framing a call
to unmask patriarchal power in readiness for "a brand new start". "My elegy to the
patriarchy" is how Campbell pitches it, noting how "even the words we use to insult a
substandard man will often blame the woman - 'son of a bitch', 'bastard'." The
spellbinding psych-folk of 'Spider to the Fly' and 'Second Guessing' add themes of
"narcissistic abuse" and "repetition compulsion", lending bite to the album's take on
relationships.
Some songs were first conceptualised in 2016, when Brexit and Trump exacerbated
what Campbell describes as "real tension" amongst people. Between its gently jazzy
shuffle and cushioning arrangement, the Yoda-esque 'Do Or Die' foregrounds fortitude
in the face of gnawing anxieties. The rainy-day soul-pop of 'Keep Calm Carry On'
also started in 2016, when Campbell was staying at her aunt's flat in Yoker and her then-
husband and collaborator Chris Szczech texted her from New York about the Brexit vote.
"Chris was saying, 'It looks like it's going to happen' but I was like, 'No way.' And actually
- 'way'. It did happen."
Technology is touched on with first single '4316', an almost robo-folk-pop challenge to
the idea of the "transhuman": the idea that technology might sire a new stage in human
evolution. Favouring "honest, decent communication" over AI, Campbell takes a dim
view of our "friend, unfriend, block, unblock" culture. "I know what I love and it ain't
that," she says. "I was talking to an Uber driver the other day and I said, 'I don't want to
be living in a video game.' And he said, 'Well, we are.' I feel like I'm offering a human
element in these transhuman days of artificial intelligence."
The looping sing-song swing of the title track appl
