caroline should be on your radar
live show review - post-folk-rock vibes
You may have missed something really cool at SPACE yesterday.
I signed up to work on Saturday because it was one of the only nights I’m free this month. I don’t live in Portland at the moment, so my SPACE shifts are my little toe-dips into the life that’s waiting for me to come back to it when I’m finished with my MidCoast sabbatical. Before my shift this week, I went to ABRAXAS to say goodbye, and ran into dear old Ethan and got to shoot the shit for a few hours.
I feel really grateful to be a part of the event staff at SPACE because it means I see tons of acts that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s how I found out about Oompa and KevCoast and Sadurn. This job is the reason Jonathan Richman wished me a happy birthday and I got to tell Pink Navel how much they mean to me because of my friend Alex. But the caroline show this weekend was really something special.
It was of note right away - instead of the stage, the band set up right in front of the soundboard in a circle facing each other, with chairs for the audience in a circle around the room. There are eight people in caroline, a group that started as an improv night and developed into a recording and touring act. They sound checked forever, so I had a long time for anticipation to bubble - which turned out to be on brand. Each bandmate who came up to the bar was friendly and polite, and they all got exactly the same thing, and kept coming up to the bar to get drinks for each other. This was their first gig in the united states.
caroline describes themselves as the intersection between post-rock, midwest emo, and folk rock. They’re arrangers. Their two violin players, Magdalena McLean and Oliver Hamilton, are really really important for you to see perform live. The set opened with the two of them setting the scene for what we were all about to experience, a sort of fluttering, frantic trust fall into each other, creating a context for the whole act before the rest of the band joined in.
Trust seems like a big part of the band’s ethos; there is a lot of lilting pauses and anticipatory silence, defying listeners expectations of when things are supposed to happen in a song. Sometimes it feels like the band are specifically waiting as long as they can before picking the song back up on the same, mysterious beat. It’s especially intoxicating given how many people are in the group - everyone has to be tuned into each other, into the “thing” that playing a song together must be. It’s easy fodder for the imagination: you can see them all crowding into someone’s living room to play together, imagine them all together around the table of a big farmhouse, walking to-and-from each other’s apartments on a snowy day.
Voices are an interesting instrument in caroline’s arsenal. One track, “IWR,” has them featured, creating layers upon layers of harmonies that you can only do with that many people. Their voices bled into and supported one another. Other songs were creative in a different way - melodic vocal parts sometimes felt intentionally buried in the rest of the track, providing something steady and recognizable in a sea of emotional instrumentals.
Their music conjured a lot of snowy imagery for me. It occupied a tension between frantic and delicate, which really made me think of a Spring Thaw. Little birds and blossoms trying to punch their way into life through a melting layer of snow. Brutal delicacy. I could see the white and green and smell the mulch.
There were moments of artsy, arrangement-focused close listening, but when things went hard they did really go hard. I was glad to be behind the bar because everyone else was sitting down, but I was able to headbang very comfortably. I joked with one of the members of the band afterward that when they have shows in a venue set up for a mosh-pit, I’ll be there.
caroline are on a micro-tour of the USA and Canada right now, so let’s do everything we can to get them back stateside again soon.