Full Circle
Chamber made

BUTTERFLIES AND LADYBUGS , leapfrogs and lily pad thrones fill the margins of the liner notes. A long-limbed art nouveau-style lady paints the finishing touches on a photograph of power cords. Swirling strings and gently rising piano lines accompany breathy, barely adorned vocals. The worlds of Isobel Campbell and Sasha Bell are somewhat dainty, dreamy places, if it's fair to judge by the visual touches and lyrical arrangements on their new albums.

Campbell, an original member of Belle and Sebastian who recorded two albums with side project the Gentle Waves before leaving B&S in 2002, recently released her first solo effort, Amorino (Instinct). Bell, who performs with another beloved chamber pop group, Ladybug Transistor, as well as the lesser-known Essex Green, recorded Destination Girl (Telegraph) under the slightly precious-sounding name Finishing School. On Amorino the calm is sometimes quietly wrecked by emotional storms or depressing observations, on Destination Girl more often by a kind of hyperactive good cheer, but the retro-pop arrangements on both leave a gloss of cinematic fantasy and airy make-believe, creating a design-perfect world that's sometimes hard to leave and sometimes hard to enter.

I often get into trouble with bands described as chamber pop. Lured in by irresistible phrases like "rich, orchestral sound," I end up feeling let down by compositions that remind me somehow of show tunes – untrustworthy in their uplift, enslaved to a certain style, too impressed with a songwriting era that had no problem with plastic, that loved what was slick and edgeless.

I tried not to, but after the fifth or sixth time listening to the title track of Destination Girl, I was still imagining some Jane Birkin type strolling down a Paris street in ironed hair and a very short skirt, the opening credits rolling on some wistfully romantic '60s film. Which sounds totally groovy, but isn't if you're me. I know Burt Bacharach more than I like him. The theme song of To Sir with Love makes me shiver with discomfort. So does the picture of Bell on the back of the liner notes, demurely perched on a giant lily pad.

Of course, Destination Girl is so catchy that within days I was walking down San Francisco streets (hair unironed) with its soaring strings and cheerily lovesick lyrics lodged immovably and not unpleasantly in my brain. But the moments I like best are when something cuts loose from the design – an unkind word, a sign of insecurity, an oblique phrase, something that might not have shown up in the music the first time around. "From the view that you describe, I never know which way I'm looking," Bell sings on the chorus of the softly driving "New Sensation," and the minor notes temper the smoothness of her vocals, lending the line a sense of unease. "The sad café has room for wanderers like you. And in the back room of your mind, the people linger uninvited." It's the moodiest moment on the album and the one, along with the pretty "Page 16," I keep returning to.

Belle and Sebastian practically wrote the songbook on this play between perfection and rot, lining their sugary melodies with soft-spoken insults and unwelcome reminders. So it's not surprising to find Campbell lacing her sweet songs with melancholy observations on Amorino, where she sings lightly but far from blithely about love in its various aspects, mostly colored by disappointment or longing. And equally unsurprising is that my favorite track, "Monologue for an Old True Love," although lyrically fairly straightforward, sounds the most like Belle and Sebastian in composition.