At its core, Caroline 2 is just a beautiful album made by a bunch of people who care more about the music than being the star. Instruments come and go when needed. The absolute banger of an opener, “Total Euphoria”, starts like basically every post rock song, with a bunch of instruments playing their own thing on what seems to be their own tempo and beat, and builds and builds towards the moment where it’ll finally come together into a big grand climax… and then at that climactic moment, all the instruments completely fade out into nothing but noise. “When I get home” features a distant beating kick drum like you’re in the bathroom of a club feeling fucked up and ready to leave. The one song with a guest star (of course it’s Caroline Polachek to keep with the band’s name) has a magical moment in the outro where the repetitive chanting slowly changes not only its lyrics but also the singer, nearly imperceptibly.

How incredibly artistically ambitious must someone be to plan an entire album around the lives of female saints, complete with changing languages to better fit with the saint in question? And even more shocking, she pulls it off! This album jumps all over in tone and sound and lyrics, veering from orchestral arrangements to operatic arias to heavy synths. I heard it and immediately listened to it a second time, and then a third. I listened through with a translated lyrics page open, trying to actually follow along with all thirteen of the languages used here. It’s truly a work of art.

As a teenager, I was super into rock music. We’re talking Shinedown, Chevelle, Papa Roach, etc. I’ve fallen out of it in the last fifteen years thanks to Spotify and an ever shifting musical taste, with a few exceptions like Cloud Nothings that I’m not even sure if they qualify as “rock” versus “alternative.” I was surprised to find out how much I dug this album! It’s a rock album that goes beyond the standard genre tropes to incorporate a huge range of sounds - organs, trombones, flutes, and synths! AG fucking Cook is a producer on one of these tracks (”Dull”). There’s a couple of pure rock bangers, too, don’t worry.

Never heard of them until the hype cycle for this album started coming on strong… frankly I think I confused them with Goose, which is apparently a jam band successor to like, Phish. This is the pretentious art rock I didn’t know I needed. I wonder if people in the 70s felt like this about the Talking Heads. The whole band is great, okay, but the thing that really elevates it is Cameron Winters. He does this thing that’s clearly singing, but it’s not like, in key. Or out of key. It’s like musical keys just don’t even exist in his world. It’s grating but riveting at the same time.

This was such a sleeper electronic album for me. I started off not super into the lead single, “Satellite”, but once the whole album came out I just kept on liking the whole more and more and more. It’s such a cohesive, well assembled whole, which feels like a genuine rarity these days in comparison to albums that are just collections of songs. All the guest features feel like they slot in perfectly, like this album with the collaborators is more than the sum of its parts. There’s even an awesome live performance of the album here.