Three years after their debut album, caroline returned in gloriously off-kilter fashion with ‘Total euphoria’. Driven by stabbing guitar, drums that never quite gel into place, and keyboards that hover radiantly but never quite in sync, you’re left wondering how the song could possibly amount to a sound befitting its title, but the experimental UK outfit naturally gets there. The instrumentation doesn’t cohere so much as endlessly revolve into something greater than the sum of its part, something blissfully communal, especially as Jasper Llewellyn and Magdalena McLean start singing in unison. The ambiguous betrayal at the song’s emotional core is never resolved, but you somehow get it, totally.
“Three years on from the release of their self-titled debut album, London eight-piece band Caroline deliver “Caroline 2”. In one way, it picks up where its predecessor left off — 2022’s sublime self-titled debut concluded with “Natural Death“, where they also explored the possibilities of interlocking off-kilter guitar patterns — but in many, many others, it finds them breaking new ground. Those two worlds on the opener are only the beginning. “One of the fundamental themes is the idea of different things happening at once, things that are very different from each other but also simultaneous,” says Jasper Llewellyn, who forms the songwriting core of the band with Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes. It makes for a record of extraordinary scope — where the organic and the artificial, the harsh and the beautiful, the pristine and the hazy all clash and combine. “The first record was a compilation, but this one is a declaration,” says Llewellyn. We were just about an eight-person band on the last one, but now we’re a proper eight-person band.”
The Fat Angel Sings 