The Daily Spin, June 23
Caravan Palace | <|º_º|>
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: <|º_º|> (2015)
Artist: Caravan Palace
Link:
Parisian electro-swing outfit Caravan Palace first debuted back in 2008 with their self-titled, followed it with 2012’s Panic, and then came forward with this album in 2015 - often referred to as Robot Face since anglicizing those sounds isn’t exactly… human.
In essence, though, I think that's Caravan Palace’s music described - taking human sounds and turning them synthetic, manipulating the world to feel just this side of artificial. It’s as if the world aesthetically hit pause in, oh, 1940ish, and everything since has been the beautiful meld of science fiction and music of the era, the only really modern development being the sound that comes from this band.
I can’t dance for shit, never been able to, but this is the sort of music that gets me wondering if maybe I could. Though it suffers from a pretty classic EDM problem in that the riffs tend to get a little repetitive, it’s tempered by the way the music swells around the lyrics - sometimes drowning them out entirely, and yet I’m not mad. There’s a sort of noir feel to a lot of the music here, almost dystopian, and it’s that unease that seems to fuel a lot of the driving energies behind this music - to great effect.
Human or not, Robot Face establishes that whoever’s pulling the strings, there’ll always something to dance to. I can drink to that.
Rating: 8.4/10
Best Tracks: Tattoos; Midnight; Wonderland
Worst Tracks: Wonda