♫ #lastfm artists: Caravan Palace (36), Polar Bear (7), Space Dimension Controller (5), Laurie Anderson.. via @tweeklyfm #music
— russell davies (@undermanager) November 1, 2015
I find it very easy, with all the sitting and typing I do, to get drawn into a world of quiet, slow, glitchy, ambienty music. Background stuff. It's good n all but it's not the world I want to live in. So every now and then I make sure to seek out some proper pop with tunes and beats and breaks. Something that sounds like it was fun to make. Caravan Palace fit that bill.
They're about as important in the history of popular music as Roman Holiday or The Beatmasters (ie not really) but that's the joy of them. They've found something to rub up against a thumping beat and they're rubbing away like Aladdin. In this case the pop MacGuffin is 20s/30s swingy jazz, which makes for all kinds of nice little breakdown moments, silly tunes and fiddly bits.
French bands always suffered from time lag, never able to keep up with the trends of pop. But in these atemporal days they suddenly make sense, drifting outside of time, picking up texture and looping it back to us