caroline
A few days after the launch of their critically acclaimed second album, caroline 2, the London eight-piece played to a sold-out Islington Assembly Hall as part of a short run of UK shows.
Support for the evening was provided by Crosspiece, the culmination of an experimental collaboration between Caius Williams and Theodora Laird. Williams’ deliberately distorted double-bass – achieved by using a take-away fork used as a kind of capo – and Laird’s improvised trembling multilingual vocals synchronously orbited each other in open, emotional dialogue. What began harshly and discordantly, soon gripped the receptive audience and any late comers were rightly shushed to respect the artists and the intimate atmosphere they’d created. By the time Williams switched to a guitar for the second half of the set, the tempo had built, and Laird’s vocals taken on a frenzied quality at the heart of the performance. Emotion poured across the room.
After the audience had been suitably warmed to experimentation, caroline entered the stage to ANOHNI and the Johnson’s Fistful of Love before quiet anticipation descended. The eight members arranged themselves in a semi-circle around the barely large enough stage, with a spotlit amp instead drawing attention to centre stage. Jasper Llewellyn stepped towards it theatrically and carefully adjusted a snare drum in front of the amp to capture the reverb of Alex McKenzie’s bass clarinet and create texture for the opening track Song two. This is a band who’ve fully embraced their creative urges. Acts which would perhaps seem like mere folly in isolation are, in fact, the result of refinement of process and, when in the many hands of caroline, improve the collective experience.
Live, the array of instrumentational interplay used to layer sounds comes across much more clearly than it ever could on record. The orchestral hits of violin, bass, guitar, saxophone, and trombone intersperse with sparser string, percussion and vocal arrangements as the perfect analogy for riding the peaks and troughs of the human experience.
Special acclaim must go to sound engineer Syd Kemp, for finding the space in which these elements can all breathe and be expressed so clearly. Whilst recording the album, the track Coldplay cover was created by the band separating into two four-pieces and playing different songs simultaneously in the living room and kitchen of a house. Kemp walked between the two groups with a microphone to give the impression of two tracks fading in and out. Live, the band attempted to recreate this on opposite sides of the stage, miraculously pulling off the feat without lapsing into each other’s beats. Another act of whimsy here saw Casper Hughes play the ‘Thames guitar’, an acoustic guitar which had been hung by a rope from a pier into the river Thames for two weeks. Its remaining 4 strings and the hole in its body gave the instrument a different quality which worked in this song as part of the implication of slightly distorted sound coming from afar.
Unfortunately, there was no cameo by Caroline Polachek (who was in Los Angeles according to the band) to reprise her part on Tell me I never knew that, but Magdalena McLean’s auto-tuned vocals did a fine job imparting the song’s closing mantras. The repeated lyrics of “It always has been > It always will be > It always happens > This always happens > It always will be” perhaps hint at a more melancholic viewpoint and the loss of the early optimism which inspired the original three members of the band back in 2017. Hughes, Llewellyn, and Mike O’Malley wrote Good morning (red) – one of two songs from their eponymous first album played tonight – in The Five Bells pub in New Cross whilst riding the wave of hope they’d felt when canvassing for Jeremy Corbyn. Tonight, close to Corbyn’s Islington North constituency, the world feels a little harder and colder than it did 8 years ago. Whilst the band admirably maintain a collective, equitable, and welcoming ethos, they’ve been subject to the same soul-destroying erosion of optimism as the rest of us and these lived experiences must surely reflect on the creative process. Hughes’ shouts on this track of “can I be happy in this world?” hit a little more desperately today, aching for a just life for all that feels ever further out of reach.
The crowd were treated to the entirety of the caroline 2 album on the night, with the two stand-out tracks in a live setting being Two riders down and the closer (although album opener), total euphoria. On the latter, everything happens all at once, seemingly in patterns only apparent to the band themselves. The crescendo is post-rock magnificence and proved a fitting end to an emotive evening of creativity, experimentation, and above all, humanity.
The band returned for an encore of the droningly meditative dark blue, but not before pranking vocalist Llewellyn with a hard cut during the intro of the song. It was his birthday, and they’d made him a cake. The crowd joined in with singing him a happy birthday, feeling connected once more by the communal power of music. A slightly red-faced Llewellyn led us into the track again, this time the band allowing it to build and descend spectacularly, neatly summarising the overriding feeling of the evening. Above all, caroline’s music is an invitation to reflect on the beauty of everyday life and fragility of existence.