Carpool
My Life in Subtitles
SIDEONEDUMMY
Anyone who knows anything about Carpool will likely be surprised by the start of the Rochester four-piece’s second full-length, My Life in Subtitles. That’s because the short title track that kicks it off is a tender piano ballad—plaintive and vulnerable and elegiac, all things you wouldn’t associate with their previously established brand of hedonistic, youthful emo-pop. After its 93 seconds are done, however, it’s suddenly business as usual with “Can We Just Get High?” and its jerky, lust-filled decadence, which somehow manages to infuse that post-adolescent reckless abandon with heartfelt existential emotion.
That, though, is a juxtaposition that carries on throughout as the band gets the balance perfectly right on all 12 of this album’s formidable songs. Closer “Every Time I Think of You I Smile,” like the opener, is another earnest and thoroughly unpretentious piano ballad, but their bookending of what’s between serves to make this really feel like an album rather than just a collection of songs. It’s also a chance to decompress after the emotional onslaught delivered in the middle—the urgent intensity of “Open Container Blues,” which is the best Microwave song Microwave never wrote; the dreamy, drowsy, end-of-summer (and -relationship) nostalgia of “Crocodile Tears”; the blissfully carefree vibes of “Done Paying Taxes”; the jittery nerves and soaring melody of “No News Is Good News.”
These (and, indeed, all the ones not mentioned) are the kind of songs that might sound simple, but they’re held together by layers of musical complexity and skill—a controlled chaos that’s hard to pull off. That Carpool do so so sublimely is testament not only to their songwriting skills but also their chemistry as a band, and the intentional nature of this record. Even the quasi-hardcore blast of “CAR,” which is much more abrasive and confrontational than anything else on this record, feels totally natural, even if it’s preceded by the off-kilter slacker pop of “I Hate Music.” That’s probably because this album serves as a visceral sonic representation of how it feels to be alive, and all the highs and lows that come with that.
Anyone who’s lived—or, rather, who knows what it feels like to be alive, because there is a difference—will find fragments of themselves scattered across these songs, smiling widely at who they used to be and at who they still could be, while relieving all the joys and sadnesses that occur in the space and time between the two.
