When Belgian singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist Camille Willemart, alias Camille Camille, sings over a fingerpicked acoustic guitar, you feel as if memories are holding onto you or you’re holding onto them. Inescapable either way. She’s an arresting folk artist—more than that, though, her songs are fey lullabies as if plucked from some forgotten century or land. Although seemingly innocuous and otherworldly, the tracks are weighed down by longing. Yearning pulls them from beneath like an anchor.
Yes, the encircling guitar strumming sounds as if Camille is retracing her thoughts or circling back around to a subject, an idea, a referent that lingers like a half-remembered dream. Indeed, it is a soporific-induced world in which beauty unfurls like lapping waves. Until, that is, you find Camille has ridden the symbol of the sea to its conclusion, which is to say to the shore, where she stands with fate, and fate alone.
Arriving five years after her 2021 debut, Could You Lend Me Your Eyes, Enchanted Sea is not a grand departure. However, what the new record shows is Camille’s growth as a songwriter, especially in the expansive baroque embellishments, including piano and flute, wherein you feel enveloped by the breadth of the compositions. The songwriter disappears and remerges from them transformed, and you cannot help but be, too.
Like innocence before experience, the record starts with the lullaby-esque “Bottle Song”; the childlike wonder belies the intense longing. The narrator waits for a reunion with their lover, hence the on-the-nose message-in-a-bottle imagery of the title, not to mention the actual sound effects of blowing over a bottle top, which, though conceptually it makes sense, wears thin with repeated listening.
Although “Le Vent” is sung in French, it could be in whatever tongue, as you are not drawn to the vocals but to the somber guitar tone; moreover, with one chord change, you get the impression a new world is revealed, particularly for the dramatic spectral vocals in the coda. Here, you feel the ground beneath your feet give way and, suddenly, you’re floating.
Despite, or perhaps because of, “Dove or the Devil” borrowing its melody from Leonard Cohen‘s “Sisters of Mercy”, it is one of the highlights of the record. Her tremulous voice brushes against the melody; by the end, she produces haunting wordless moans. The titular track, “Enchanted Sea”, begins with a protracted intro, an atmosphere that endows this record with a sophistication beyond your average folk LP. It isn’t until the two-minute mark that an acoustic guitar enters. In this instance, Camille’s unquestioning optimism works when it becomes a hymn. She expresses the sentiment of doing one’s best for one’s progenitors, with the emphasis on the fight against climate change.
The language of “J’ai rêvé”, the apex of the album, is its hypnotic guitar strumming, as if this is “The Partisan”. At the halfway point, drums and a tambourine chime in; they build toward a crescendo, when a flute and a mandolin rise to the surface as if they have always been there, augmented by Camille’s crystalline vocals. She seems as if she can see and pull the music along like a thread, wondering where it will lead her, or where she will lead it.
The music of “Dans Ce Paysage” sways like a boat, as Camille hums over a caressed-strummed acoustic guitar. When a horn and a tambourine arrive, you cannot help but marvel at the track’s beauty, not to mention the ending’s sparse and squelchy production effects, echoing Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room.
Undoubtedly, Camille Camille is a talented songwriter with an alluring voice, which neither imposes itself nor hides—in other words, an unadorned voice with poise and grace. Enchanted Sea is a gentle and, indeed, an enchanting album. If anything, it is a chanson record disguised as folk, full of longing, like two lovers separated by sea.