Caroline

caroline 2

Genre: INDIE / ALTERNATIVE

LP (Black Vinyl)
CD (Compact Disc)

Boomkat Product Review:

London-based collective caroline grow into their boots on this strong second dispatch, kinking their ambitious, genre-busting songs with canny production frills and genuinely thoughtful compositional nuances. Absolutely RIYL Dirty Projectors, Still House Plants, Bark Psychosis, Jim O'Rourke or Mount Eerie/Microphones.

caroline's eponymous debut arrived in 2022 with plenty of fanfare, but didn't quite hit - at least for us. The intentions were good, but the high-minded fusion of folk (two of the eight-piece band's core members played in an Appalachian outfit as teens), post-rock, emo and cinematic chamber pop was a little clunky; it motioned towards high places, rather than reaching them. Imagine our surprise then hearing that their second album scales a musical Everest; it's smarter, weirder, leaner and far edgier than its predecessor, almost without trying. caroline start as they mean to go on, splicing a rehearsal tape into concertina-ing guitar chords on 'Total Euphoria' - something that hits the Reich/Chatham/Sonic Youth axis immediately - and overlaying boxy time-distorting drums and saccharine harmonized vocals for the all important hook.

We hear numerous bands jumping on the "studio as instrument" thing and it rarely holds up to scrutiny, but caroline are genuinely doing it - they barely even need to mention it, you can use your ears. Like Still House Plants, they approach their songwriting from an obtuse angle, bringing with them knowledge as well as knowhow. They've got the numbers, so instrumentation isn't an issue, it's just working out how to assemble things interestingly, and the process they've developed is stunning. Just in a single song, we're taken from 20th century minimalism to sing-along soft-hued folk and ear-bleed harsh noise, and it all sounds abnormally congruous, as if Phil Eluverum's sitting behind the mixing desk.

It's also worth noting that they do all this with a cheeky wink to the camera. There's no po-faced academic snobbiness - we get the skill but not the attitude. So when Caroline Polachek turns up on the brilliant 'Tell me I never knew that', it's deployed in the knowledge that explaining the collaboration to anyone is certain to cause confusion. To our ears, it's the best track Polachek's been near in years; her voice is perfectly matched with caroline's dense mass of textures, curling around staccato horns and jangly acoustic guitars, shifting seamlessly from folksy sweetness into neo-hyperpop repetition. It's a way for caroline to accept the aesthetics of the present without having to chew through anything as crass as hybridisation; see also 'When I get home', that suggests techno as an illusion with a pounding kick that beats as if it's bleeding from a nearby venue, never disrupting the integrity of the song itself.

The band are able to create a sound that's completely holistic, as if the album's been created to mimic the experience of feeling music, not just hearing it. Different takes are collaged with each other to create space as well as color, and an ambiance is manufactured, a sound that's completely caroline's. The songs exist within a frame: rhythms and playful harmonies start, stop and sputter, and we're able to examine their brilliance from a cocoon, even when caroline are convincing us they're covering Coldplay. It's so, so well done, really - 'caroline 2' is the promise of Bark Psychosis's paradigm-shifting 'Scum', a record that protested against manufactured pop by proposing the opposite, pulled into the AI era, a knotted mass of ideas, asides, inspirations and intrigue that's so intricate, delicate and human that it's impossible to replicate. We're floored.