Carina Round - The Disconnection

Carina Round’s 2004 album Disconnection is exactly the sort of music that reminds me of what New York smells like.  Armed with a sound that at one time we would have called “indy”, but which has become so diffuse as to be meaningless, Round attacks her songs in a heavenly voice, but one that is paired with snare heavy drums that slice through the production like an illegally obtained box cutter, a chugging bass and guitars that aren’t afraid to hit you with a slab of distortion right between the thighs.

"Shoot" opens the album, with the hollow reverberating drums, an off tempo cadence, keyboards and the sound of a hollow body guitar being fed through an amp with more than a little of the edge rolled off. Carina pulls no punches early her Wolverhampton accent coming through on the laconic delivery, but she’s not here to give it to you easy. There is an undercurrent of menace, you’re surfing the edge of an explosion and the band rides the beat until you get thrown off of the musical mavericks wave. Very few women will open with lyrics like these:

Come with me falling through the red clouds helplessly
Come kiss me so that I can read your lips

I feel a shoot
I feel a thunderbolt
Undo my body
I feel a shoot
I feel a thunderbolt
The entrance of your soul

She doesn’t lay off for a minute. You expect a respite? "Into My Blood" evokes so much more, echoing early PJ Harvey’s delivery when the discordant guitar takes up the rhythm:

I wait all my life
Just for the rush
The passing of fire
Into my blood

All the reasons that raced through my mind
Just to keep me twisted and dry
I leave them behind

And lets address it right now: Round has heard Harvey’s Dry and is mining much of the same territory sonically, much in the same way that the Black Crowes were mining the same rich earth as the Rolling Stones in their first two albums. Nothing wrong with that. Harvey’s Dry was a huge game changer in the music world, and there is plenty there to still be explored musically. Round absolutely expands the vocabulary of the trio that Harvey had at the time when the horns come in on Lacuna, or when the mellotron keyboards start to mirror the vocal melody. Round’s self confession "There's a lot to be Said/for this morbid self-attention/The problem lies in my external obsession" comes across as both revelatory and inevitable. She knows it and shes not going to change. 

Perhaps I can still smell the café smoke of the Champs-Élysées, but the snappy rhythm of the acoustic guitar that rules "Paris," the pop of the horns on the chorus and double tracked Carina’s make this song a delightful little breath of fresh air. Very few would write lines like:  "I used to float in your eye stream to weigh up my beauty day by day/I know broken bones don't come close to the pain of hidden truth/I caught your dream in mine, I saw us walking hand in hand and mean it," but yes, she does, and when the photo album snaps shut the song ends like a book. Slammed shut.

If the self confession exists in "Lacuna," "Monument" is a travelogue of the soul, paired with too many details to make it the fiction that might otherwise become. The sound starts out quietly, delicate rhythms being played on the sides of the drums, but the fullness of the guitar and the swooping of the fretless bass belays the innocence. "Will it rain then and drown this out/I could die here and never be found out/Sweat freezes on my face/Moving forward from this place/Screaming into a new world."  We’re time shifting back to the romance of Paris, to the ripped apart future of the new york taxi, perhaps screaming through 6th avenue on a nighttime ride back from JFK, and the with the breathless Oh, god, just this once, let it come, the band takes flight the way that Led Zeppelin would 3 minutes into the song, a coked up guitar suddenly taking up a double time rhythm signature, the drums becoming relentless, Carina’s delivery becoming breathless, the song exploding into the new, leaving the Gare Du Nord behind.

"Overcome" weaves itself on the loom of the acoustic guitar and Carina’s delicate breathy vocals, but finds the one possible vocal melody for the chorus “I will overcome” that doesn’t drift into cliché but seems somehow like something new that you’ve never heard. Even here, as the strings come in, that nothing is settled, that the musically schizophrenic match does nothing more than take what might be the sweetest song on the album and infuse it with just that little dose of unease. I will overcome/I will over/Black wings spread overhead/Lover, didn't you know me.

Sit tight, the next to last track is slow poetry, almost a duet except for that Carina sings an indy cabaret, all red velvet and smoke and elbow length gloves right before last call. Her art betrays her in the lyrics: no female punk would sing:

Restraint is the frame that you have found
But I see your soul as Juan Miro
Or maybe a Chagall
Escaping through your eyes like a liquid time

and no female punk raised only on the guitar trios would move to the funk guitar and hand claps of the break . once again, Round plants her feet firmly on sonic ground at the beginning of the song only to take us unexpected places along the way.

Round closes the Album with "Elegy," and its main fault is that it sounds like an album closer. It builds up from the sparse guitar opening to perhaps the longest solo on the album 5 minutes into the song, but while good, it pales in comparison to the sonic innovation that precedes it. I hate to be critical to a song that’s merely good, but it might be, in my opinion, the most lightly regarded track on the album only because its what you expect her to end it with.

--Rock Iguana

buy here: The Disconnection