In early April I took the train from Chicago to South Bend to visit a friend and to get a better view of the eclipse and to take a load of my mind, and on the way down I listened to caroline—the self-titled record by British post-rock octet caroline—for the first time in a while.
The South Shore Line is an interurban, an endangered species of American transit infrastructure. The rails run along the southern edge of Lake Michigan, setting out from downtown Chicago, passing through the Indiana Dunes, and finally alighting at the airport in South Bend. The better half of this course cuts through a heavily industrialized stretch of Chicago's South Side and Northwest Indiana—steel mills, warehouses, railyards, landfills, highways, factory towns of modest single-family homes.
[image taken from the South Shore Line's website.]
In early April it rained, and the clouds threatened to overpower the eclipse, at least in my corner of the Middle West—but there, on the train, the pale clouds drew out the melancholy of that terrain. It has always intrigued me. I live in a dense, walkable urban neighborhood with a lot of office jobs and bus routes and fusion restaurants and things of that nature. This has been the fabric of my adult life. Thus the American Rust Belt, the industrial small town, the contrast between the vastness of manufacture and the smallness of those houses—it has a certain romance. It feels wrong, almost political, to say that about something so ordinary and ubiquitous, but I mean it as well as I can.
There's something wonderful and terrible about the way these man-made things become the very landscape. There's something uncanny about these artificial topographies.
In the afternoon, there was a pale, dreary light, and raindrops ran down the windows of the train, and I listened to caroline, and I meditated upon the vast and small things, on space and on spaces.
caroline was my favorite record of 2022—the year it came out—in large part because it sounds like so few other records. It's an odd melange of folk, minimalist-classical, and rock music, built on repeating musical phrases and gradual crescendi. Its lyrics are sparse but they gesture towards broad, elusive emotional landscapes. It is a record more suggestive than anything else, full of elisions and unrequited tensions.
The vast spaces of caroline's songs are composed of small gestures. Rituals, almost. There is, I think, a counterindustrial impulse in that record, which manifests as text (i.e. distinct yet vague allusions to leftist political organizing), subtext (the preeminence of acoustic instruments on what is ostensibly a rock record) and, I think, metatext (the artificial megaliths, half-abandoned spaces, and distant, incidental cityscapes that underpin the visual language of their music videos and record covers). More than anything else it is a profoundly communal album. It lives upon the patient interplay of its performers. It defies immediacy, flashy showmanship, and conventional songwriting. It has its own self-contained, self-sufficient logic.
(caroline, it also turns out, know a good train ride when they see one. It was meant to be.)
There's something to be said for letting a sound grow loud while the train rolls fast beside the built-up river basin. caroline is a record of grey clouds and sudden color, like the landscape of the industrial Great Lakes. Chords cycle, ringing again and again and again, and the view changes constantly.
That contrast of change and stasis intrigues me most of all. There is a contrast between the organic structures of the music—slow patterns, gradual swells of volume, odd syncopations—and the hard presence of the built industrial environment; there is a contrast between the forward momentum of the railroad—blurred landscapes, glimpses of other lives, the accidental intimacy of running rails between strangers' backyards—and the circular movements that dominate the album.
There's something to be said, too, for listening to such slow music while moving quickly. Have you noticed the relativity of things, how objects in our foregrounds slip in and out of view faster than things that are farther away? You can hear it in songs like "IWR," when individual chords slip by while the whole piece passes over slowly, or in "Skydiving," where countermelodies creep about the edges of the song's main motif. You can see it from the windows of a train, too: the smokestacks are motionless while the gates of the factory whiz past the window.
That afternoon caroline was as much of a journey as the train ride itself. It transported me in its own way. The record has a fixed form that becomes familiar to us, in the same way a train, bound to its rails, runs the same right-of-way over and over. It, too, has its rituals, and god, I love a ritual. I love to learn a place, a path, an experience over and over and draw meaning out of it.
What I'm saying is the train whistle sang at the perfect peak of the chorus of "Good morning," and it felt right.
