Sometime around the 6th grade you realized there was a second layer of meaning in the universe. This was your birth of sarcasm and irony. Never again would anything mean just what it said or did. "Nice job" would no longer, necessarily mean, "nice job". A Michael Bolton t-shirt wouldn't mean that you were the type of person who liked Michael Bolton, but the type of person who mocked those who liked Michael Bolton's music. This was, at the very least confusing, this cruel pulling away of the curtain, and, if you are about my age, Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" came out a year later in 1995 and confused everyone with its litany description of unfortunate incidents, classified as irony though they certainly weren't. Did she know these things weren't necessarily, "ironic"? Was that the joke? Was she being ironic in her misuse of irony? All of this is to say, it is a profound relief when something says and does exactly what it sounds like it might. Florida's Carrousel and their rewarding single, "14" spins under its own weight, draped in bare-bulb carnival light, a bunch of flying horses chasing one another into infinity. The aesthetics are all rich baroque, a dream-pop break up song taken to the top of the room where it seems content to draw rococo designs on the ceiling under lyrics like, "You stole my love and you stole my heart." This needs no second layer. It is exactly what it says it is, a sonic tautology and a beautiful one at that.
Listen :: Carrousel - "14"
2 comments:
Beautiful work, lovely stops and starts. Hard to find any more info on the band, but I did 'like' them on FB and got a free download for the effort... The album gets mentioned as releasing in February, but that's come and gone, so I guess there's a delay.
Listening to this, I realized they reference John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14". ("Batter my heart of three-person'd God") Just a note. :)
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