With all the best bits of the recent nu-shoegaze craze (see: the Big Pink, A Sunny Day In Glasgow), it’s amazing that veteran Robin Guthrie has made an album that, however unintentionally, takes the newcomers to school.
The Cocteau Twins guitarist/sound designer is one of the most crucial figures in shoegaze, and the wafty, watery instrumentals on Carousel flaunt that cred with wild abandon. Superslow jams like “Some Sort of Paradise” and “Delight” are beautifully sleepy, but the spectral atmospherics of “Mission Dolores” and the seriously explosive “Waiting By the Carousel” truly make the album—the tracks are unmistakably Guthrie. And though it definitely suggests classic Cocteau Twins dream-pop (maybe more so than anything else Guthrie’s done), Carousel is so gorgeously consuming that you won’t miss Elizabeth Fraser’s voice for a minute. Promise.
