5ingles

Anna Caravelle
"Where Have You Been?"

Florence and the Machine

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More About

• Florence and the Machine
• Anna Caravelle
• Joanna Newsom
• Curren$y
• Peter Woods

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Joanna Newsom's huge, sure, but shouldn't the indie-rock diaspora make more room for dewy-maned harpists who happen to have imaginary unicorn friends? I say yes. Haughtily polyphonic of voice and dexterous of digits, Caravelle brings into being a revolving, magical world that feels simultaneously archaic and fantastical just so she can say she totally wants to hug you.

Caribbean-breezy, chaise-lounge shit like this sells itself. Quoting select lyrics or dissecting the beat doesn't do any justice to the whole. Go cop this.

Florence Welch is kind of intensely, involuntarily convincing, isn't she? I would totally believe that global warming is a hoax if she and her band wrote a monster single declaiming it.

A gentle, ragged plea to quit our PCs and "clean out the fridge/take out the garbage" set to the "We Are the World" melody sounds good to these ears. "This is the real world where we live, curious and busy," Phil Elverum notes. He's right, you know.

On his last.fm page, this Milwaukee noise entrepreneur dubs himself "the Henry Rollins of noise." I'm prohibited by space limits from fully parsing that title—really, there are so many possible interpretations—but this closing track from his Creation. Death. Machine. album is a slow-burrowing monster, a tactful study in compositional, delayed-gratification patience, the noise equivalent of that uncomfortably long nighttime shot in Storytelling where you just know that gas is slowly killing every Livingston in the house.