Carroll’s adventures in Wonderland

Music | September 24th, 2015

With Minneapolis and St. Paul a relative stone’s throw away, it’s especially hard to avoid the aftershock of whatever musical A-bombs are dropped by Twin Cities musicians as their impact spreads to the rest of the nation. We were some of the first to catch droplets of Prince’s “Purple Rain,” bang heads to the Replacements and pick up the dropped science of the Rhymesayers label. Though it would be downright ignorant to say that the Twin Cities are facing a musical drought, there has been a noticeable lack of the area’s representation on a national scale in recent years.

With the release of their self-titled debut, the lads of St. Paul’s Carroll may soon be finding themselves the next indie ambassadors of the region. After almost four years of honing their mercurial sound gigging around the region – Fargo’s music lovers have been fortunate enough to have had two opportunities to catch them – as well as teasing palates with their “Needs” EP, the quartet is quickly perking up ears nationwide with the icy echoes abounding on their eponymous full-length album.

The product of two and a half weeks in Philadelphia with Jon Low, a producer boasting credits with the likes of the National and the War on Drugs, “Carroll” arrives as a fully-formed and elusively eloquent opening statement. Like the low-hanging cloud of a dream slipping further from grasp as the dreamer returns to wakefulness, serpentine synths and glistening guitars wallow subtly, surfacing as echoed hallucinations of themselves.

So often used to hide uninspired playing and weak songcraft, this smoke-and-mirrors studio trickery actually serves Carroll quite well. It thickens the meatier passages, as on the back half of highlight “Are We Different?” as heavy guitars crunch cavernously under frontman Brian Hurlow’s pleading vocals. Just as disparate visions spill over one another in REM sleep, the frosty production binds the ten songs as a unified statement, despite the many rabbit holes that the individual tracks burrow through. The echo chamber treatment comes close to being an instrument in its own right at times, like on the opener, “Alligator.” Its absence on the song’s sober chorus creates tension, broken soon after in a flooded return.

Where the album’s production cloaks the music in an air of mystique, Carroll’s lyrics are denser yet. While there is an air of lived experience in them, they are not so much representative of concrete images or scenes but instead the shadows of them, angular sketches of already-misplaced memories. Journeying to the center of the subconscious mind, Hurlow casts confounding coos as such on “Bad Water”: “California makes your face look new / bad water makes you feel like running / those wires that you’re talking through / keep something buzzing.” While lines such as these add to the album’s headiness more often than not, there are occasions when obscurity veers too far into absurdity. It’s hard to avoid chuckling at the ridiculousness of Hurlow opening the otherwise solid “Boxing Day” with “I put poison in your ice cream.” Dreams do tend to gestate in odd corners of the mind, I suppose.

A good album, however, is more than production wizardry and compelling lyricism. Beneath the foggy layers lies a solid bed of tight pop songwriting, with arrangements taking unexpected, but not jarring, turns, and each melodic barb sinking deeper with subsequent listens. This is an album that should not only inspire regional support, but the national ear.

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