Caroline
5
By Bzzabear
Reviewing an album like this instills a paralytic sense of hesitation. Immersed in a world of sounds at once both immensely striking and heartbreakingly fragile, any commentary threatens to shatter Caroline's crystalline vocal melodies or puncture a poignant pause. While influences bubble up throughout, the overwhelming sentiment while listening to Verdugo Hills is that of being transported to an intensely personal and beautifully innovative musical landscape.
One listen to the opening track "Balloon" and we're floating on a softer than silk and lighter than air cushion of vocals that leaves leave you suspended at the doorstep to the rest of the album. The wonders intimated in this introduction compel the listener on with a sense of curiosity reserved for years long since left in our childhood.
The album's single, "Swimmer" chimes in with a spotlighted classical acoustic counterpart rarely found in electronic music, and champions the delicate peace Verdugo Hills has worked out between the often exclusive genres. Caroline sings defiantly over the ominous weight of heavy piano strings: "In my room, I've been swimming, and your pond has been warming. I think you, bring out the best. Oh you, bring the highest high." The lyrics pull us close into Caroline's world, one accented with sounds both comfortingly familiar and wonderfully alien. Halfway through the track, drums crackle and spark voraciously, burning the arrangement to an ashen heap, leaving Caroline's vocals to rise, sail and soar flawlessly on through the abandoned space.
The follow-up track "Sleep," begins sleepy-eyed, rolling its synths through the half-heard realms on the fringes of dreams, only to be shaken awake by a stoic, rumbling synth. In a voice fragile yet certain, Caroline sings, "I can recall sun in my eyes. I wont connect scars and their ties. Before you go, check your bags. Make sure you have everything." Both the track's lyrics and arrangement speak to a quiet triumph of self-control and to a casting off or a farewell. The forceful percussion at the end of the song carousels into a swirl of confident leaving and hope, tailed by a quiet nostalgia that calls back the earlier somber tones of the track.
"Seesaw" stands out as the albums most creatively demanding song. Composed as much with restraint as with invention, the song's title is tersely accurate. Between a pulsing, tempered verse and a floating chorus flecked with popping percussion, Caroline sings a cool melody constrained to the tight dynamics of three notes only to jump to the lofty flighted single note of the chorus; a movement mirrored, too, in the lyrical sentiments, "I am, reciting lines until I believe them, holding smiles until I love you, again". After two verses and choruses, the song's reservation unravels in a furl of explosive percussion and distorted synth, pulling the full track in line with the counter-balanced design of its parts.
Throughout the album Caroline walks a fine line between stark contrasts, between euphoric celebration and heart wrenching confession. The heliotropic "Words Flutter" buds, blooms, flowers, and reaches toward sunnier heights even as it sheds the lyrics, "Your words flutter from head to toe, no where to stay just momentary love". The intoxicating track "Waltz" circles in a champagne wash of bubbling bass, iridescent reverbs, dry kicks and swooning harmonies, all the while cautioning "You'll mean nothing to me, I'll mean nothing to you. Think again, again, again." The trumpeted intro to "Snow" gives way to a groove and beat driven track that quickly picks up any feet that might be "trudging through the snow", and plows on into incredibly catchy and deftly balanced live drums over electronic beats.
The track which absolutely breaks my heart with every listen is "Pink Gloom". Pulls my heart apart like wet bread, and pieces it back together with a single, soaring, irreverent vocal line at the end of the track. I would be hard pressed not to believe that the substance of tears, both those of joy and of sadness, are distilled to their finest purity in this track.
The album closes with a hand-clapping farewell in "Gone." The timid music-box sample opening the track is shortly joined by a shy ukulele and mandolin, which Caroline lifts to impossible heights by simply joining in to sing. Soon after, what seems like an entire orchestra of miniaturized instruments, claps and pats parades the song on toward a finale topped with a never-before-heard instrument pulled straight out of the magical genius of Caroline's electronic invention.
And then the album stops. And the air around you seems taught with an elastic anticipation of finding some of the sounds you just heard out there in the world. And all I can offer is that you listen to the album again...again....again.
