Ahead of the release of the new album 'caroline 2', the band talk about the influence of Danny Brown and their collaboration with Caroline Polacheck and making "a declaration not a compilation".
Photos: El Hardwick | Words: Lloyd Bolton
Musically, caroline are an outlier among a London scene into which they might initially seem to fit quite naturally. Their members' talents are spread elsewhere as far and wide as The Umlauts and Shovel Dance Collective, their live setup resonates with the current folk revival and the busy stages of the seven/eight/nine-pieces that have proliferated with increased success since at least the breakout of Black Country, New Road. Then music itself combines a kind of folk rawness with a strong influence from post-rock. But all these comparisons do not quite capture what the band is, given their primary focus on process and musical concept, which produces a music built on collective improvisation and simple musical loops and plays with stretching ideas beyond their logical conclusions. The major influences on new album 'caroline 2'? Caroline Polacheck (who also features on 'Tell me I never knew that') and Danny Brown, particularly 'Scaring The Hoes', the album he did with JPEGMAFIA. Without breaking unrecognisably from the self-titled debut, the band draw on these points of inspiration lean more into obviously artificial techniques and a collaging of poppy melodies, their meticulous control of the final product sharpened even further. We spoke to Mike O'Malley, one of the three core members of the band, about the new album and the techniques that went into it.
O'Malley explains that the band tend to work from the ideas of the three core writers – himself, Casper Hughes and Jasper Llewellyn. Voicenotes are passed between this central committee, three-piece jams are recorded, and these ideas are then extrapolated by the rest of the eight members. Within these ideas, however, there tends to be a deeper level of conceptual loading that informs what is to be done with the music itself. "It's rarely just like, 'here's the melody' and then we jam. It needs some kind of framework to make sense… normally nothing's presented until there's some kind of concept ready."
The group have never restrained themselves to simple verse-chorus arrangement, but on 'caroline 2' this tendency feels particularly pronounced, with songs cutting or drifting between sections to the point that it is not always obvious where one song has ended, or will end up. This is where the Danny Brown namecheck comes from. "We were referencing music that has this fast, shifting collage thing where you hear new sounds popping up every five seconds." Of an artist like Danny Brown in particular, O'Malley says "other people would say it's like sampling, but I think when it is so fast it feels like it goes more into collage territory."
'Coldplay cover' is only the most striking example of how the band have translated this 'collage' approach to their own music. For this track, we literally hear two pieces of music being sandwiched together. The first section is introduced, performed by half of the band in one room of a house, and then a microphone is physically carried into a different room, where the other members start playing a new piece of music. This then gently clashes against the "when you lie" refrain still filtering through from the other room. The recording is complete with the floorboard creaks of that journey between rooms.
Excitingly, it sounds like the band will be attempting some form of live adaptation of this process on their tour, which starts this Saturday. This felt appropriate, given that for them, the heart of the song is this process, more than the music itself.
"It doesn't really matter what the songs actually are, the point is the journey of the microphone and the going between the two songs – that's the performance. Although it is good to land on two things that you feel have an interesting relationship, which is the case [with 'Coldplay cover']; the second song that you hear is kind of derived from an alternative version of the first song.
"But I feel that that song is kind of performable with all sorts of musical ideas… the recording concept of listening to a travelling microphone, that's the kind of conceptual framework for it."
While these loaded musical concepts inform the creation of the music, they are not necessarily immediately obvious to the listener. Given how easy it is to manipulate a listener's experience, one does not ever necessarily assume that what they are hearing was performed in the way it might sound. Does it matter that a listener may not immediately grasp the original concept that generated a song?
"I think that's one of the big unanswerable questions of this project – and probably for a lot of projects. There's the means by which you come to an idea, the process, and I always like to think that the process is on display, but actually the resulting thing is extremely subjective."
Whether through traditional songwriting or more process-based recording, it is never possible to tidily curate a listener's response to an album. All the same, it is possible to leave a more general impression, as is the case on this record when we repeatedly hear songs shift and cut between ideas. Setting 'caroline 2' against the debut, the band see this album as "a declaration rather than a compilation". The first record collected the band's recordings up to that point, songs that had existed while the band was still growing in numbers and ideas. With this record, there was more of a consciousness that these were songs being written specifically for an album. Establishing a common theme among these, O'Malley sees a recurrent motif in "the meshing together of environments in a very obvious and forefronted manner, within shortform, pop-inspired songwriting."
We hear this in the clashing of guitar riffs on 'Total euphoria', and more sublminally in that track's juxtaposition of roomy drums and close guitars, O'Malley feeling "it doesn't really work how it's supposed to if there isn't that separation". Then, on 'When I get home', we hear, underneath a delicate song of vocals, acoustic guitar and clarinet, the pulse of a dance track created especially by Daniel S. Evans and Jennifer Walton.
The heavy incorporation of pop melodies across the album is a striking component of the album, and in many ways it is emphasised by the heavy use of pitch shifting, formant shifting and autotune. This seems to complement the artificiality of some of the structures, but O'Malley reflects that though "there is a conceptual relevance" to the use of vocal effects, it "just kind of happened naturally".
"We used to do this long improvised version of 'BRJ' live and Magda would use autotune because she had this FX box [on stage] for something else, and it just fit really well. Her voice sounds really amazing through hard autotune."
Applying these effects to their new compositions, "this thing happened where it felt like there were all these different characters emerging depending on how you set the formant".
caroline and Caroline Polacheck
Deepening the sense of collage on the record and signposting the conscious tendency towards pop melody, 'Tell me I never knew that' released in April with a surprise feature from Caroline Polacheck. O'Malley explains that hers is "probably our most talked-about music as a group in the history of our band", and that her approach to melody has long been an obsession of theirs. On 'Tell me…', they felt that certain moments felt particularly reminiscent of her work, and from there developed "kind of a joke" that they should ask her to sing it. She had shared their music on Instagram previously, so the band cast a DM into the void, and she came back "really quickly" to say she was up for doing it.
"She came in with a load of extra harmonies, and she'd tweaked the lyrics slightly to make it feel a little more comfortable", he recalls, impressed by the homework Polacheck had put into the session. They then experimented with her vocals across an evening. "She sang for like, five or six hours, and that was kind of funny because we really don't work that way. We do, like, little spurts of work and then have quite a long break and then a bit more… people get tired quite quickly. No one can sing for six hours!"
Though it may seem like a surprising collaboration to an outsider, O'Malley does not see it as particularly disjunctive from the rest of the band's work. "It doesn't feel like such a crazy crossover to me because her music is referenced in my head a lot". Well, roll on the Danny Brown feature for 'caroline 3'…
For all it's artificial elements, analogue and digital, 'caroline 2' is delightfully covered in the fingerprints of its creators. It is meticulously planned – O'Malley admits that "it's a very unspontaneous project, but I think that's a good thing". At the same time, there is a human rawness that enters in through the performances, vocals being only the most obvious. The untreated group singalongs like that of 'Coldplay cover' and the paired vocals of Llewellyn and McLean on tracks like 'When I get home' and Total euphoria' transmit this, but paradoxically a similar closeness is generated by the autotune-heavy moments, from the crackling of 'Beautiful ending' to the catharsis of 'U R UR ONLY ACHING'.
It feels appropriate, in this sense, that the record starts on a deliberately awkward note, a humble stitch, putting front-and-centre an older demo from which 'Total euphoria' grew, one of several examples across the album of such composting. "That song started as a kind of rock band improvisation just guitars and drums, and then Jasper made this version that was just looping the chords that Casper was playing and writing kind of topliney melody to it. And then he did a load of sessions just him and Magda singing all the songs in unison… and that's the first three seconds of that demo." That demo version is, apparently, included on a limited edition version of the album going out in Japan. For the rest of us, though, we'll just have to project into that space between those tentative hums and the blast of guitar that blows them away.
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