Caroline Says – Winter is cold (from the album 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong, Western Vinyl)

I love a good backing vocal.

Especially the kind that elevates something already good into something special.

That’s what happens here on the opening song of the album by Caroline Sallee who goes under Caroline Says.

A simple but handsome acoustic fingerpick takes on an atmosphere of intrigue with the addition of an intrusive backing hum.

I say intrusive to mean you can’t but be aware of it and it’s recorded right up to the mike becoming a wash that is higher in the mix than you would be used to for background humming.

It also enters along with the main vocal which is immediately...not disorientating as such but certainly wrongfooting.

Later the hums turn into sighs and swoop and swoon in a way that only reminds me of My Bloody Valentine.

This is a clue for the rest of the album in fact as folk rubs shoulders with off kilter jangling pop elements (in which some of the melodies carry a certain MBV-ish menace). You might not say shoegaze bit it is a dream of what pop music could be. And the backing vocals remain brilliantly centre stage.

Gorgeous.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Best of 2014 - Part 4: Jazz/Chamber/Orchestral/Wonky/Ambient/Minimalist

Best of 2014 - Part 3: Psych/Krautrock/Punk/Blues/Glam/Tropical

Matthew Bourne - Montauk Variations (The Leaf Label)