If the evocative title of Victoryland’s label debut grabs your attention, I’m here to tell you that My Heart Is a Room With No Cameras In It totally earns it. The Brooklyn-based project of Julian McCamman quietly released its first tape, Sprain, just a week before the musician’s former band Blood released their debut and final album, Loving You Backwards. The wiry, whimsical, and emotionally piercing new album finds McCamman continuing his collaboration with producer Dan Howard, who worked on both of those records, and honing their mid-fi pop ambitions to brilliant effect. “Was it even worth trying/ Knowing someone is crying for us/ Watching an infinite loop of our lives,” McCamman sings at one point; even at its most desperate, the album sounds like it’s somehow enjoying running back the tape.
1. Here I Stand
The name of Julian McCamman’s former band is, I’d venture consciously, the first word we hear on My Heart Is a Room With No Cameras, introducing a poetic image: “Blood inside my body flies under your veil.” The song kicks off the album somewhere between defiance and desperation, with acoustic guitar chords that coil like a fist over an off-kilter psychedelic loop, opening up only in brief spurts.
2. No Cameras
As deliciously quotable as it is catchy, ‘No Cameras’ thrives on the edge of romantic separation – McCamman sings “Watch me fade out” with ten times the exhilaration that he declared the opening track’s titular statement. Love leaves us dumbfounded and McCamman takes that feeling and runs with it, committing to lines like “Heart is a buried jar of honey” as if recording the moment he notes them down. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up a classic in his discography.
3. I got god
The energy only ramps up with ‘I got god’, where a nagging synth arpeggio clashes with a booming rhythm section, their dynamic shifting throughout the track’s runtime. As he stares down oblivion, the music caving in around him, McCamman sighs, “I remember fondly having feelings to hide.” Now other people’s indifference seems preposterous, so he seems to be talking to the mirror when, breath frail, he braces for the future: “If this is the loneliest you’ve felt/ Then buckle up.” They somehow make it sound exciting.
4. Keep Me Around
The album keeps mining the theme of dumbness for its strange potency, and this dizzying stab of a song only softens after proclaiming, “We might be dumb forever.” Over a Coldplay-esque piano progression, McCamman pleads for relationship permanence even if it rests on a toxic dynamic. Not sure Chris Martin would write a song about that, but the sentimentality prevails.
5. Arcades
Sprawling and piercing at once, the instrumentation matches the impressionistic turn in McCamman’s lyrics, as if the entire first minute is meant to serve as evidence for his claim that “You were spending all damn day swallowing trains.” He and Dan Howard play with different frequencies not just throughout the album, but within the space of a song, sounding crisp until the almost uncomfortably intimate confession that closes it.
6. Blur
There are dozens of classic psychedelic indie records My Heart Is a Room feels in conversation with, which you should keep in mind when I say that ‘In My Place’, in that IAN SWEET way, sounds like a reference point for ‘Blur’. Self-pitying yet incisive, it includes one of the album’s most striking lyrics: “In the wire fence of your aching past/ You’re stuck waving from behind.”
7. You Were Solved
The drunkenness of ‘Blur’ feeds into the next track, which is hardcore in spirit and dance-punk in style – a golden combination that jumps out of the speakers. McCamman’s impassioned performance does the music justice, his lyrics appropriately anthemic: “I’ll dance like/ I’m your bitch/ We’re just shaking out the night from our wrists.” When you can’t hold forever in your palm, what could be better?
8. Beach Death
The piano ballad thankfully retains its demolike quality, which does little to drown out McCamman’s aching vocals – he sings of settling down like a strange brand of instability, identity rupture. It’s startling yet strangely soothing as ripples of piano and a filtered melody wash over.
9. Fits
With an ethereal guitar riff and drums steadily rising in the mix, the song takes its time to establish its altitude before McCamman swoops in to shout: “And in the air.” (“Is where the night falls.”) Stretching over six and a half minutes, ‘Fits’ longs to turn every kind of sickness bearing its mark on the album into an out-of-body experience. As the pulse slows back down, the song avoids a totally melancholy or nostalgic conclusion, shaping its chords into the perfect in-between space before ringing out – as if into, to quote an earlier song, “inanimate voids.”
10. I’ll Show You Mine
My Heart Is a Room With No Cameras closes with its most jangly and emotionally legible song – and, in its morbidly animalistic imagery of “two dumb dogs just bleeding out on a concrete floor in a room somewhere,” even its most human. An exquisitely dressed-up song about the primacy of the body, its ugly desperation, and the innate need to have it shared. Our protagonist may be buckling up for more loneliness by having it exposed, but it certainly isn’t just him.
