When you study popular music you tend to ask a lot of questions: Why was this piece of music recorded? Who was it recorded for? When and how was it recorded? Who is the target audience? How did the artist intend people to listen to their music? It can be a distraction sometimes when you stumble upon some new band or record to have all these inquiries floating around in your mind. But it can also allow you to appreciate a record you would have definitely not listened to all the way through three or four years ago.
Austrian music duo Cari Cari have produced such an album. Internationally active and yet relatively unknown in Austria itself, they have set out to create music that could be used for a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack (they’ve definitely achieved that). And although their sound is not really my cup of tea, I have to applaud their creative effort and consistency.
Picture the desert under a starless sky, the ground beneath your feet, cold and coarse, alive and ancient. Feel the cool breeze coming down from the canyon on your face, the sand rubbing between your toes, the memory of a golden sun dancing over your skin. Hear the distant sound of running, of feet hitting the ground in a long forgotten rhythm, a lonesome guitar echoing through the night.
Anaana, the duo’s 2018 album captures a scenery as much as a sound. It is rooted in the Western aesthetic of Enrico Morricone, firmly bound to the hundredth motherfucker uttered by a Tarantino character, inhabited by an idealised grittiness, a monument to the old frontier. There is a great sense of distance immediately introduced on the first track, Mapache, that mixes together Miserlou-esque guitars with whispered vocals – voices never in the centre of the mix but circulating around you, moving in the space.
Gradually, you build up a craving for some closeness, a sense of proximity that is finally satisfied on Nothing’s Older Than Yesterday with its clean and central guitar lines. And yet, the vocals escape that desire for touch, that desire for closeness and connection. Although we get a nice laid-back whistling tune and even more layers to the brilliant vocal harmonies – this needs to be said: Stephanie and Alexander have found in the other a perfect vocal match – we are not allowed to see clearly, the horizon remaining a blurred line in the open and vast space of the prairie.
Come for the sound, not for the lyrics. Come for the creation of a landscape, of a land from a different time and space, not for the musical innovation. There are some musically surprising moments on Anaana – the flicker of a mouth harp on After the Goldrush, the sudden appearance of a didgeridoo on Camoubee – but overall, the record creates a coherent and consistent musical ecosystem, a space where every drum beat, every bass line, every guitar riff works only in relation to its sonic context.
The only breakout, the only vastly different track we are given is Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night (really digging that title btw): a tender ballad, suddenly capable of that closeness and connection I so longed for. Sliding between the notes, refusing the cleanness of a solid tone, opting for the liveliness of slight imperfections instead. An unusual intimacy that makes you feel like you wandered in on something you were not supposed to hear, and yet so relieving on a record that idealises vastness and distance. A smart choice for a closing track: give them something alive, breathing, something warm to hold onto.
Cari Cari’s music is not really for me. But: Anaana is a conceptually strong and cohesive record. It does feel like a soundtrack at times, the visual power of the music undeniably present, the necessity of a temporal and spatial context audible in every bar. I don’t know whether Tarantino is already thinking about his next feature – but maybe he should travel to Austria for some inspiration.
The Dad Anthology 