In recent weeks I’ve been obsessed with r/visiblemending, a joyously strange corner of the internet. Users of this subreddit don’t simply mend their own clothes, already a revolutionary act in the age of fast fashion, but do so in ways that make their garments look as though they have been amateurishly hand-fixed. Cross stitches in brightly coloured thread, patches of wholly different material, and a bit of ornamental sashiko for good measure, the visible menders transform their wearisome clothes into wearable artworks, beloved celebrations of the crafting process.
I find it impossible not to draw parallels between this phenomenon and London eight-piece deconstructed rock band caroline’s approach to composition on their groundbreaking second album. Throughout caroline 2, the stitches that hold together the group’s bulging avant-folk patchwork are defiantly on show – it’s a celebration of the whole process of creating art, and doing so with your friends.
caroline 2 arrives as the follow-up to their self-titled 2022 debut, and it’s a record laden with contradictions. Meticulously crafted over three years, it is the product of a group of musical perfectionists for whom songs can never be finished – and that shows throughout.
On one hand, the group has refined their sound further, developed their chemistry as a group, and really focused their songwriting. The improvised, looping sprawls of their debut have not entirely faded away, but the songs are generally more direct, shorter, more purposeful. Pop hooks are also plentiful, and everything feels like a deliberate and considered choice, whereas before there was meandering and lackadaisical improvisation.
But on the other hand, caroline 2 is messier than its predecessor. Some of the songs sound deliberately incomplete, and the album’s collage nature is inescapable. It recalls the group’s 2020 dada-folk mixtape 𝑵𝑪 𝑵𝑱 𝑵𝑳𝑭𝑻 far more vividly than their Rough Trade debut.
Visibly mended music, caroline 2 sees disparate parts that weren’t made to match stitched together, and signifiers of the editing process are left in. You can often hear that the final product is made up of different recordings of varying fidelity, whilst echoey vocal demos often sit alongside fragments of heavily manipulated vocals. For these reasons, caroline’s songs here feel like living, breathing pieces, bearing the scars of the group’s labour.
Throughout, delicate songs are presented in a series of different ways that reveal the process of creating – for instance, ‘When I Get Home’ integrates scratchy demos of embryonic versions of the song into the intricate end product, in a bid to capture the spontaneous magic of its composition. Meanwhile, ‘U R ONLY ACHING’ oscillates between a maximal post-rock recording of the song by the whole eight-piece, complete with glitching autotuned vocals, and a minimal folk version that just features the vocals of Casper Hughes and Magdalena McLean, singing the song on a blustery day in Nunhead Cemetery.
The sections that make up sugar-sweet single ‘Tell me I never knew that’ deliberately sound glued together, whilst ‘Coldplay cover’ takes this to an extreme. A novel recording, it features half of the octet playing a fragment of a jagged folk song in one room, and the other half of the group playing a pastoral chamber pop piece a few rooms away. About halfway through, you hear the recording engineer Syd Kemp stand up with his microphone, amble between the rooms in a bid to connect the two disparate parts as one cohesive whole. Fractious harmonies, somehow beautifully entwined.
Of course, these unusual methods of presenting the music would count for very little if the songs on caroline 2 weren’t total gems in and of themselves. They are devotional, beautiful songs that earnestly capture the rawest and strongest points on the spectrum of human emotion – a modus operandi that begins with the vibrant guitar clangs mission statement opener ‘Total euphoria’, and does not let up until the final violin drones of ‘Beautiful ending’.
The most valuable item in the toolkit of these master crafters is a truly exemplary sound. caroline’s music revolves around a delicate folk exoskeleton, which incorporates strange strings a la Arthur Russell and Henry Flynn and misfiring post-rock guitars in the vein of Hood or Gastr Del Sol. When all eight members play together, sparks fly.
The lyrics of core songwriter trio Hughes, Jasper Llewelyn and Mike O’Malley are often plaintive repeated mantras born from improvisation, and are especially effective in evoking naked, raw emotions.
The Caroline Polachek-featuring ‘Tell me I never knew that’, for instance, features a soaring outro of finger-picked guitars and droning textures, which is darned with rising repeated, ruthlessly effective choruses of: “it always has been / it always will be”. Elsewhere, throughout the album, the lyrical motif “now… I know your… mind” runs through a number of songs, cried out by Hughes and Llewelyn at the most delicate moments of ‘Song two’ and ‘Coldplay cover’.
Referenced artists
Caroline Polachek
Caroline Polachek
Meanwhile ‘Two riders down’ is another real highlight, a sprawling elegiac centrepiece with real emotional gravitas. Here the group is a ballasted orchestra, the violin and clarinet stagger towards an uneven euphoric climax whilst a haunted and pained group vocal pleads: “set me on fire, set me on fire / two riders down, two riders down.” There is not necessarily any production tomfoolery here, but a novel ramshackle arrangement ensures that the song’s crumpled, wonky, ecstatic, cathartic crescendo seem all the more powerful – on this song, caroline make something that is not only beautiful, but deeply tactile.
caroline 2 is a remarkable second album from one of Britain’s greatest bands. Throughout the album, the exquisite way in which this album is crafted adds so much to songs that are already awash with beauty and romance.
There is an intimacy inherent in the way that caroline let the stitches, scraps and seams show across this record, and masterful playing and songwriting matches the presentation perfectly. The world is increasingly dictated by algorithms and artificial intelligence, increasingly hostile to the creative process, so it is so beautiful to hear an album so handmade, so lovingly-crafted, so visibly mended… A total love-letter to the labour of creating.
