When the sumptuous, soul-warming sound of Tracyanne & Danny’s debut track Home and Dry dropped unexpectedly in February, fans experienced a twofold reaction: both joy and relief.In October 2015, a rare form of bone cancer called osteosarcoma robbed the life of Glasgow indie pop band Camera Obscura’s keyboardist Carey Lander. That is the exact word Lander’s bandmate and best friend, singer-songwriter Tracyanne Campbell, uses three years on: robbed. “We were all robbed of Carey,” she laments sternly, angrily. “And the band was robbed of our job.

”A crowdfunding campaign launched by Lander in her final days went on to raise more than £102,000 for Sarcoma UK, bringing some tiny semblance of light to the tragedy. But after that there was only lingering sadness and silence, the group’s future left uncertain. Lander’s illness claimed the life of a much-loved and talented musician at just 33, but it also silenced a popular band in their prime.

So it is a relief to learn that Campbell was silenced only temporarily. Home and Dry was the first taste of a full album recorded in rural seclusion at Edwyn Collins’s cliff-top Clashnarrow studio, near Helmsdale on the north-east coast of Scotland. A tender and crisply realised collection of panoramic pop vignettes and yearning love songs, it’s a collaboration with Danny Coughlan, the Bristol-based singer-songwriter known as Crybaby. A close friend who shares Campbell’s love for ornate 60s guitar pop, Coughlan was the creative foil she needed to swap song ideas with by email in a delicate process of confidence and career rebuilding [ . . . ]

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