BC Camplight – How To Die In The North

★★★

It’s been a big year for people coming back after long absences, and Brian Christinzo – known professionally as BC Camplight – is not an exception.  He’s only been gone for eight years – the same length, for example, as Modest Mouse, who will be ending that drought in March – but unlike a lot of the others he left just as he was starting to make a name for himself.  He decamped from New Jersey to England in 2012 and set about rebuilding his confidence in recording.  The first result of this is How To Die In The North, a return to the psych-pop that his first two albums were steeped in.  There’s a heavy dollop of Seventies-era schmaltz present here, the kind of music that would feel right at home in the back of an old Buick, preferably one whose interior strongly resembles a French whorehouse.  When it works, as on “Atom Bomb” and “Just Because I Love You”, it’s AM gold.  When it doesn’t, it comes off as cheesy at best.  Christinzo has the Harry Nilsson and Todd Rundgren thing down, but whether that’s a good thing or not is best left up to the listener.