“Some people get romantic crushes — I get musician crushes,” says Beth Cameron of Black Bra, whose self-titled debut comes out Friday via YK Records. “When I’m out and about watching shows and I see a musician I love, I keep them in the back of my mind.”
Cameron had many admirers of her own in Nashville in the 2000s, as the creative force behind the artfully angsty Forget Cassettes and teenage punk phenoms Fair Verona before that. She moved to Chicago and signed to U.K. label One Little Indian around ’07. But the deal ended up falling through, leaving her disillusioned with the biz and music altogether.
“I moved back to Nashville to pick up the pieces,” Cameron remembers. “I went to college, got a degree, did other stuff.”
Gradually she eased herself back into playing, joining singer-songwriter Jordan Caress’ top-shelf synth-pop combo Ponychase on lead guitar — “It was nice to let someone else steer for a while,” she says — and occasionally performing solo under the Forget Cassettes moniker. (There were also some full-band shows in support of 2013’s O Cursa, a suite of three Forget Cassettes EPs collected on two LPs.)
At one of her solo gigs, Cameron met future husband and bandmate Miles Price. The two married in 2016 and started casually making music at home, with Cameron on vocals and guitar and Price on bass. The following spring, a bolt of inspiration hit.
“We took off work, sat in a room and worked on demos for five days straight,” Price says. “Four songs from [Black Bra] came out of that.”
They didn’t have to look far to find players: Cameron just consulted her mental list of local musician crushes, turning up synth player Jesse Case and drummer Tyler Coppage. Playing matchmaker was cellist-about-town Larissa Maestro, whom Coppage knew from playing together in singer-songwriter Jasmin Kaset’s ensemble.
“We’d just gotten offstage at The High Watt, and Larissa told me her friend Beth wanted to meet me to see if I’d be interested in playing some music with her,” Coppage says. “I was like, ‘Beth Cameron from Forget Cassettes? You’ve got to give me a minute because I’m fanboying out over this.’ ”
Case, a stand-up comic when not playing keys, had just returned to Nashville after 10 years in L.A. when he and Cameron connected. “I had the same starstruck feeling as Tyler,” he says. “Forget Cassettes was my favorite local band in high school. … I was even at the last Fair Verona show at The Muse, and just remember watching this woman up there with an SG, thinking, ‘This is awesome.’ ”
“I Was a Young Girl” opens Black Bra, and is one of the four songs written during Cameron and Price’s staycation. The track recalls PJ Harvey’s ’93 classic Rid of Me with its urgent 6/4 riff and turn-on-a-dime dynamics. It’s an appropriately turbulent sonic backdrop for lyrics that confront childhood trauma head on and vow to conquer it, as Cameron sings: “If I have to live with it / I don’t want to believe it / I don’t want to relive it … I never wanna forgive / I never wanna succumb.”
Cameron calls “Young Girl” the impetus for the band. “When we first got in a room and played it, it was immediate, like, ‘Oh, fuck. This is good,’ ” she says. “The chemistry of us playing, and the voice and message of that song took me to a place I really wanted to pursue further.”
Album art: Black Bra, 'Black Bra'
The foursome spent more than a year writing and finessing a set before first unveiling it in July 2018 at The 5 Spot. They were just as deliberate in preparing to track the LP, collaborating on a Spotify playlist of inspirational recordings that included songs from Portishead, Radiohead and Broadcast, plus two from Harvey’s Is This Desire? They went into engineer Jeremy Ferguson’s East Nashville studio Battle Tapes and knocked out the entire thing in four days.
“We set up close together in Jeremy’s tracking room — very non-COVID-friendly distances,” Price says with a laugh. “That helped a lot with keeping eye contact, playing off each other and realizing we could do a song in four or five takes and each would be inherently different, with their own moments of greatness but also human mistakes, the organic element.”
The result is a texturally rich rock record that is serious in nature but neither rigid nor precious in execution. It fluctuates gracefully between outwardly intense and ominously sedate, with a penchant for dramatic codas that build and explode. Its eight songs are sturdy and sharp, tied together by Cameron’s arresting vocals and a trademark wall-of-sound mix from longtime Yo La Tengo collaborator Roger Moutenot.
It arrives at a time when we could all use a good primal scream. “I think it’s a timely album — COVID or no COVID,” Coppage says of Black Bra. “The record, especially lyrically, has got some catharsis to it. It speaks to a lot of what’s happening externally from us.”
