Caroline’s music is not only about connecting with emotions or the mere act of experimenting, but also about the process of musical creation itself. This concept comes to life live, a phrase that may sound cliché, but is especially meaningful in this context. At a Caroline concert, the audience witnesses the construction of the songs in real time, while its eight members truly juggle with their varied instruments and voices.
We are talking about the typical rock band configuration – electric and acoustic guitar, bass and drums – but also, for example, an unusual mix of violin and autotune, guitar and trumpet, saxophone and electronic noise, or voices that whisper in one moment and, the next, scream desperately trying to be heard through a deafening wall of sound.
Their unusual mix of post-rock, bucolic folk, chamber music, drone and voices pitched to the extreme, like the one presented on the album they present, ‘caroline 2’, is about both tenseing emotion and savoring silence, as well as exploring the sound itself, investigating instrumental timbres and textures – like those of that intense bass saxophone or that squeaky violin – that are sometimes not as expected.
Arranged on the stage of the Upload room in Barcelona, where they performed this Tuesday with everything sold out, in a kind of semicircle, the eight members of Caroline are able to watch each other play, entering into dialogue. Jasper Llewellyn is the main vocalist, but each member also has their moment of musical or vocal prominence. When you watch a member play to your left, a voice or saxophone note suddenly comes in from the right.
It’s fascinating to watch them in action, especially since their songs already seem to be created on the spot on their own recordings, but that’s precisely the trick that reveals itself live, whether in the naked emotion of ‘When I Get Home’ – with that delicate Magdalene voice filtered by autotune – or in the thunderous crescendo of ‘Two Riders Down’. During the set it becomes evident that behind the apparent chaos of the music hides an absolute control and mastery of the technique: the music can go from a sustained, epic and overwhelming build of tension to suddenly cut off, leaving you breathless in the face of a thunderous silence, like when the power suddenly goes out.
His modus operandi becomes evident in ‘Coldplay Cover’, a song that Jasper introduces by clarifying that it is NOT a Coldplay cover, explaining that his composition process consisted of recording two different songs being played at the same time in different rooms. It makes us imagine that on the right they play in the kitchen of a house and, on the left, in the living room. It’s exciting to see how they play with the amplification of voices and instruments, playing instinctively on and off the microphone.
Of course, the group reserves the highlight for the finale with ‘Total Euphoria’, which builds tension until exploding in a glorious moment of catharsis. During his performance, violinist Oliver Hamilton appears sitting with a beer, as if his role has already ended, but only because he is preparing for his epic final solo, where he enters into battle with the rest of the instruments.
I may have spent the entire chronicle trying to explain and reason what makes this group’s proposal special. But perhaps so much explanation runs the risk of implying that to enjoy Caroline’s music you need to know or understand something, and that is not the case. It is recommended to come with an open mind and accept that the group operates with a different logic than usual. And maybe you will leave the concert with the same feeling that my friend had, who at the end of the concert commented: I didn’t understand anything, but I loved it.
