We've been fortunate enough to have some really nice things written about our latest CD, "Sometimes, Always, Never"

From PopMatters
On their fifth album, unsigned Brooklyn indie-rock intellectuals Love Camp 7 offer up a quirky little slice of life with a cast of characters from the group's collective and individual lives. Populated by figures encountered in the flesh, in newspapers and yellow-paged tomes alike, Sometimes, Always, Never is chock full of odd, relatively unheard of references that will send listeners scurrying towards Wikipedia to discover who the band was talking about. The forgotten lore of neo-folk heroes who otherwise may have been left to the page margins of high-brow, liberal, cocktail party-level obscurity, were it not for Love Camp 7's name dropping, is ever-present on the disc. Sometimes, Always, Never isn't just catchy, it's downright educational.

A melting pot of influences, Love Camp 7's unique sound combines '70s pop rock like The Kinks with a throwback to '80s and '90s indie rock sensibilities heard in bands like Violent Femmes and R.E.M. Add to that a generous dose of the benign, harmony-rooted sound of the Beach Boys and just a dab of the likeable humor and intellect of early Weezer ... and that about sums them up.

Love Camp 7's signature calling card is, without a doubt, their lyrics. Somehow, primary lyricist, singer, and guitarist Dann Baker finds a way to cram the most obscure of subject matter into hummable songs and does it well. Notably, "Naming Names" is a brief history of snitching in the 20th century. Accented by some killer, fuzzed-out lead guitar work by Steve Antonakos, the song is an impressively scathing account of the Communist Red Scare of the McCarthy era. No one is safe, from beloved S.A.G. president—and eventual U.S. president—Ronald Reagan to Elia Kazan, regarding their testimony to the House of UnAmerican Activities. Decidedly punkier than most of the tracks on Sometimes, Always, Never, "Naming Names" would get a huge thumbs up from Joey Ramone, as it channels the bouncing bitchslap of "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes To Bitburg)".

From the politics of the past to present, Love Camp 7 gives props to unsung folk heroes and American voices of dissent. The anti-war "Barbara Lee (Is Having No Trouble Sleeping)" lauds the California Democrat as the lone voice in either House of Congress to vote against authorization of military force in the Middle East following the events of September 11th. Echoing traditional protest songs of the '60s, with shades of flower power and a mellow message of discontent, Love Camp 7 makes this peace-piece rich with three-part harmonies.

Reaching slightly further back into the annals of American history, Ohio State University student protestor "Jon Strange" has a question for Secretary Albright back in the days of the Clinton administration, at a televised 1998 open-forum town meeting held on campus. A cheerful, peppy recounting of United Nations violations in other countries, Love Camp 7 breaks out the cowbell on this one, while demanding reasons for selective military action.

Not everything on Sometimes, Always, Never is a political tirade, however. Marginal figures get their time in the sun, thanks to Love Camp 7's lyrical modern folk tales. "The Queen of Whale Cay", channels The Kinks' jangling snark while lyrically telling the tale of legendary lesbian boat racer and Standard Oil heiress Joe Carstairs, who purchased her own island in the Bahamas. (Top that, Bill Gates!)

"Telephone Girl", praising the unsung heroism of operator Louise Gipe, who in 1928 phoned the residents of the area surrounding the collapsing St. Francis dam and alerted them to evacuate, switches up the pacing. Chock-full of the art-house eccentricities of the Talking Heads, the band's guitars and drums alternate between placidly plinking away and chugging out an angry (well, as angry as Love Camp 7 can muster) beat on the chorus and bridge. Things wind up with a garage band-esque cacophony of horns blurring with guitars on the song's coda. On the ecological ode to naturalist "David Gaines", bassist Bruce Hathaway has ample opportunity to shine and show his chops. The bottom-heavy boom warms up the sound and roots the track firmly—and rather appropriately—in the earth.

Other characters and places come out of nowhere. "Connecticut"'s gently rambling guitars and thin, yet impassioned vocals nicely showcase Love Camp 7's tight musicianship, rife with a slew of vocal and instrumental melodies and countermelodies. On "Once Upon a Time Our Valley Was Green", Baker utilizes his falsetto register on the R.E.M.-iniscent track, beginning on an almost classical sounding note on the wistful, pastoral, little ditty.

The group is rather adept at throwing in musical surprises throughout the course of the disc. "Little Mr. Elephant" yields an unexpected guitar crunch, considering the song's seemingly fluffy subject matter and Buddhist overtones, while "Muñoz (In the Sunshine)"—an autobiographical tale told from the vantage point of Baker's cat—is beefed up with a surprising horn section at the end of the track.

Considering their intriguing sound, which marries a host of influences together, and encyclopedic knowledge of current and obscure historical events, it's odd that Love Camp 7 is unsigned. They bring something completely different to the musical banquet table. Political without being overtly punk, and musically sound, Sometimes, Always, Never is enjoyable from beginning to end, with tracks that grow on you even if they don't floor you the first couple times. The downside comes unless you're an reader who commits to memory even the smallest minutiae of either the daily news or the disc's liner notes (which, thankfully, deliver background on the songs' references); Love Camp 7 can beat the listener over the head with their intellectualism. Their harmony-laden style and clever cobblings of sound are refreshing, however. And hey, it's always nice to learn something in a new and enjoyable way.

From Muze:
The brilliantly eccentric Brooklyn band Love Camp 7 are rooted in the 1960s pop operas of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Who, and the Kinks. On SOMETIMES, ALWAYS, NEVER their songs hymn the lives of unsung heroes, forgotten eccentrics, and minor personalities of American popular history, such as the lesbian oil heiress who ruled her own Bahaman island, a principled politician, and a courageous telephone operator. Their music is a blend of neo-psychedelia and vintage rock & roll, as packed with surprising twists and turns as with sly references to the sounds of yesteryear.

From Lucid Culture:
Their great shining moment. There will assuredly be others, considering how good the unreleased material that they've been playing live has been, but this is their best album to date. It's a triumph of soaring harmonies, catchy hooks and general fearlessness for these authentic 60s psychedelic throwbacks. Rich with catchy melodies, steeped in history, the album gets better with repeated listenings, in the spirit of great psychedelic, garage and art-rock bands from the Pretty Things, to Nektar, to the Kinks.

The album opens on an apt note, with some found footage from the studio."I can't really…can't really hear myself at all. Am I even in the mix, man?" demands a mystified Dave Campbell (an Elvin Jones devotee and one of the two or three best rock drummers of this era). Then the band launches into the opening tune, Connecticut, a jangly, harmony-driven tribute to the 1999 NCAA champion Connecticut Huskies basketball team: "driving past the mighty Eldon Brand." Connecticut was frontman/guitarist Dann Baker's alma mater. "Did I ever think I'd look back fondly? No, not really," he muses.

The next cut is about Baker's cat Munoz: "The universe is magical!" he purrs. But then he gets lost in Chinatown, and there's a forlorn wah-wah driven passage straight out of the Pretty Things' SF Sorrow, into a short, squalling free jazz breakdown, back into the intoxicatingly catchy chorus. After that, there's the brief Naming Names, punky with slide guitar, a rogues' gallery of some of the friendly witnesses and those who sold out their colleagues before Joe McCarthy's infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.

The following three cuts are a trilogy, a look back at corruption in the southern California irrigation system in the 1920s and 30s, and its disastrous results. The first part, Once Upon a Time Our Valley Was Green features an achingly beautiful hook coming out of the chorus. Love Camp 7 have so many hooks they use them judiciously: other bands would have started out the song with that descending progression and would have hit you with it with every chance they got, but these guys always leave you wanting more: until they clock you upside the head with another one just as good. The trilogy's focal point, Telephone Girl, with its eerie circus motif mid-song, is a tribute to a brave telephone operator who took it upon herself to call people in the surrounding area after shoddily constructed dam broke and unleashed a landlocked tsunami of water. The cycle concludes with David Gaines, a tribute to a California conservationist and freedom fighter, cast as a retro English dancehall psychedelic number.

Many other good songs on the album. Little Mr. Elephant nicks the intro from Hell's Bells by AC/DC brilliantly into a bouncy psych/pop number. The Queen of Whale Cay starts out as a bouncy, cheeky march a la something silly off of Village Green and then turns into a gorgeously sunny, jangly tour through one gorgeous permutation after another. The rest of the album chronicles people, most of them everyday Americans in their moment of glory, standing up for their rights. But first, the self-explanatory 39-second Nobody Knows As Much as Phil seems very much to be about legendary/exasperating knowitall jazz dj Phil Schaap. Harvey Weinberg is based on an imaginary character from a 60s camp film, a middleclass dad type trying to hang with the stoners and having a hard time cutting it: the faux-60s bluesy solo toward the end of the song is priceless. Barbara Lee salutes the California congresswoman who was the only person in Congress to vote against giving Bush war powers in the wake of 9/11: "Barbara Lee is having no trouble sleeping." Jon Strange opens like Rain by the Beatles, a jangling 12-string guitar playing against a wall of distorted chords, with lyrics taken from the transcript of one Jon Strange asking some particularly pointed questions of Madeleine Albright at a town meeting-type event at Ohio State University. Strange's simple, brutal honesty plays out against a beautifully triumphant, Beatlesque melody. The album closes with The Seeds, which sets some of the liner notes from legendary 60s garage/psych band the Seeds' first album to a somewhat over-the-top musical treatment complete with long extended guitar jam. It's hard to tell who's playing what, Baker or the ubiquitous Steve Antonakos (who's now apparently a full-fledged member of the band), but redoubtable bass player Bruce Hathaway holds the wheels to the rails.

Love Camp 7's previous work has occasionally been taken to task for being overly nostalgic, or for having a Beach Boys fetish, and neither neurosis rears its ugly head here, at all. This cd makes a good present for someone who's into quirky 60s revisionist bands like XTC or the Essex Green, and serves as a welcome antidote to the legions of freak-folk stoners who pretend to be 60s when they're really just a change of clothes away from James Taylor. Great album. 5 bagels. With nova, Bermuda onion and ripe beefsteak tomato. Love Camp 7 choose their live dates judiciously: they typically play the Parkside on the occasional weekend. The album is available at select independent record stores, online and at shows.


From This Week In New York May 23, 2007
Named after a cheesy 1969 women-in-a-Nazi-prison flick, New York-based Love Camp 7 makes jangly sixties-era feel-good pop, albeit with a surprisingly subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — political edge.



From Lisa & The WonderWheels News 03/19/07
Love Camp 7's Sometimes, Always, Never documents the gorgeous, smart,
harmonic, psychedelically gift-wrapped songs the band used to play before
their current engrossment with the very exciting alt.Beatle-Baker project
- which I hear they are recording now. Remember the moving and unique
water trilogy? The happy Mr. Elephant? Or Barbara Lee (who is having no
trouble sleeping)? Buy the album and take this genius band's Wonka-rock
trip anytime you want to.