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 Caught in the Carousel "There will be music despite everything"
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Careful
Oh, Light
Independent
Eric Lindley has a knack for building things. The braintrust of NYC's Careful, Lindley's penchant for assembly is in his DNA—his great grandfather was Bohemian Zeppelin engineer Karl Arnstein—and his complex musical compositions are constructed with asymmetric meters and innovative polyrhtyms. This might sound a bit too scientific for pop music, but Lindley's songs are unique, innovative and surprisingly moving. A student of physics, classical music theory and engineering (and a graduate of both Dartmouth and Cal Arts) Lindley is a complex and singular talent. On the surface, these are simple low-fi bedroom hymns (like the doleful acoustic beauty "I Shot An Apple Off Her Head") but a closer listen reveals that in Lindley's world, not only is everything not what it seems, what things seem to be aren't even close to what they actually are. "Every Epiphany" flickers with layers of atonal experimentation; "New Life" starts as an acoustic number but gives itself over to a series of whispers and what sounds like an axe swinging through an electric field miles away. Later, "Fox And His Friends" is gentle and stirring, "I Loved A Girl But She Loved Me" is spare and heartbreaking and the album closer "I Shot Smaller And Smaller Fruits Off Her Head" is as sprightly as it is sorrowful.
—Alex Green
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