After their incredibly well received, completely genius debut album. caroline have crushed a UK and EU tour since the last email. They are an unstoppable force moving incredibly slowly. Festivals coming up, as well as a handful of dates in USA!
“caroline’s debut represents a reinvention that’s as stylishly coherent as it is surprising…Production subtleties sudden blurts of strings and a far-off vocal on “Good Morning (red)”, the faint whine on “Messen #7” abound and compound the set’s ear-swivelling impact.” – Uncut
8 people travelling around is a slog, and their MINIMAL live set up involved taking 5 guitars around. These troopers have been soldiering on in the face of adversity with nothing – but one of the greatest live shows you could ever hope to watch, and one of the most brilliant debut albums ever – to their name.
“Sometimes things sound much better when there’s empty space,” says Llewellyn. “Sometimes you might populate [a song] with too many things and forget that an element on its own is enough.” Elsewhere on the record the band have employed a collage-like technique, combining snippets of lo-fi recordings from a myriad of different locations – a barn in France, the members’ bedrooms and living rooms, the atmospheric swimming pool in which they also filmed sublime live sessions for ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Skydiving onto the library roof’ – with more traditional group sessions at the Total Refreshment Centre and their studio in Peckham.
I went to Motel Mozaique festival in Rotterdam to watch their 3 day artist residency there. The finale was an hour of improvised music with the incredible duo Able Noise and I filmed it and we recorded the audio, and I hope that sometime soon we can share it.
“For caroline are a superorganism that feeds off itself. There is all the fun of the fair to be had in watching how the band’s two electric guitarists, Caspar Hughes – who met Llewellyn at the University of Manchester – and O’Malley, egg each other on. At the close of Skydiving onto the Library Roof, they dare one another to leave bigger and bigger gaps between the clanging downstrokes they play in unison. It’s a musical staring contest that would be comedic if it weren’t so tense. Trumpeter Freddy Wordsworth watches both guitarists, judging when to add his blare.” – live review in The Observer
The Fat Angel Sings 