There’s something slippery about C.A.R. Even the name (supposedly standing for ‘Choosing Acronyms Randomly’) suggests a refusal to sit still, a project built on sidesteps and evasions. At the centre is Chloé Raunet, once the voice of East London electro trio Battant, now steering her own vessel through waters that shimmer between post-punk unease, frostbitten electronics and pop music with too much self-awareness to play it straight. If Raunet’s earlier work sounded like someone hunting for catharsis in shadowy corners, her latest album, Dance At Oscar’s, turns towards the light – though it’s a light that flickers, restless and sly.
The shift is not accidental. A pandemic pause pulled Raunet away from music and into film: her debut documentary, I Am Weekender, re-examined the legacy of WIZ’s infamous video for Flowered Up’s ‘Weekender’. That detour seems to have sharpened her sense of narrative and performance. Returning with new collaborator Joni, she frames C.A.R. less as a solitary vessel and more as a dialogue. The partnership crackles on record, a reminder that creative chemistry can tilt a project onto new tracks altogether.
Dance At Oscar’s, released on Craig Richards’ label The Nothing Special, is precisely that tilt: a body of work that privileges movement over brooding, pulse over posture. Written and reworked over two years with Nathan Ridley at Hermitage Studios, it glows with late-night play and gear obsession. The Roland TR-808 makes its inevitable entrance, joined by the Lexicon Prime Time delay, tools of dancefloor archaeology, here bent into crooked new shapes.
Each track behaves like a shard from a different mirror. ‘The Pageant’ plays at monarchy and moral rot with a grim theatricality, a coronation soundtracked by machines. ‘Gentle Sunsets’ basks in warm synths before revealing the chill of consumer stupor. ‘Shade In Me’, lifted from a collaboration with Andy Bell of Ride, retains his bass and guitar but is rebuilt with live percussion, giving it a physicality absent from the original sketch. Elsewhere, Raunet wanders into half-spoken incantation on ‘Set You Down’, indulges in machine-funk delirium with ‘Shyana’ (where Paul Anka drifts in as an odd touchstone), and nails pure pop impulse with ‘Hi-Vis’, ‘29 and Falling’ and ‘Anzu’. The closing ‘On The Line’ dissolves into dreamlike vocoder, echoing Laurie Anderson’s ghost in the circuitry.
Raunet’s trajectory has never been linear. With Battant she brushed against the Weatherall orbit, only for tragedy, the death of bandmate Joel Dever, to redirect her path. C.A.R. became the vessel for her obsessions, releasing through Kill The DJ and Ransom Note, collaborating with Gesaffelstein, Red Axes and Ivan Smagghe, her songs later reinterpreted by Roman Flügel, Michael Mayer and Peaking Lights. Live, she has walked the stages of Berghain, Le Bataclan, Nuits Sonores, Red Bull Music Festival Moscow, always inhabiting spaces where genre boundaries blur. Since 2013, her NTS show On The Slip Road has been an ongoing diary of restless taste, a refusal to colour inside any one line.
Dance At Oscar’s is not a simple rebirth. It feels more like a sly shedding of skin: the same C.A.R., but lit from another angle, dancing with mischief, and daring us to follow into the half-lit space where joy and unease keep swapping masks.
