With only one single streaming, Carol has already generated significant interest in the local community by combining soft ambient folk with a complex vocal tone, fluttering harmonies, and searing lyricism. Her debut EP, Softest Destroyer, finds the poet and songwriter building sonic spaces that are lush and downy, radiating from the artist and nestling into sun-soaked corners. Softest Destroyer allows Carol’s floating vocals to drive a reflection on the self and what we sacrifice to those we care for. That sacrifice threads together the intricate layers, melding into the luscious ambiance built by producer Ruben Radlauer (Lady Pills and Dirt Buyer).
Carol utilizes the organic and inorganic to drench the listener in emotion and sound, springing up from below and consuming, centering around womanhood and embrasure of femininity in a higher form. The end-product is a musical space anchored by Carol’s poems spun into lyrics and softly articulated guitar, accented by urging percussion and keyboard, flowing vocal harmonies, and distorted, crackling synths. Softest Destroyer saturates the listener in an immediate, suffocating sense of urgency that consumes the listener while leaving them paralyzed, bound to the unfolding sound.
A seemingly new addition to the Boston music scene, Carol has been practicing her craft as a poet and songwriter for many years and is finally bringing that work into the public space. Her live performance reveals a talented artist expanding into the space she is creating for herself. In addition to her own music, Carol performs with Tongue Splitter Overdrive in a role that flips the softness of her solo work for maximalist anger pushed to its limits. It’s common to find anger in the Boston DIY scene; a population of young artists going through growing pains translates into a space saturated with overflowing emotion. By comparison, stumbling your way into the space Carol creates is a welcome breath of perfumed air. It isn’t an emotional reprieve – much of Carol’s music dwells on themes of self-sacrifice, loss, maturation, and surrender – but it is an exercise in emotional restraint and release, embracing vulnerability as a form of power that allows for transcendence from the corporeal.
Carol’s music, live or recorded, demands a full-body attention that is only satisfied by surrender to its currents. The singer introduces herself with a question that is equal parts plea and challenge; “Are you ready to receive my love?” The lead track on Softest Destroyer is a reflection on love and the spaces we build with partners, sometimes at the sacrifice of our own safety. This dwelling on vulnerability is the central theme of the EP, every song beckoning the audience in-ward. ‘If Ever’ continues this with some of the most chilling vocal lines of the EP; eerie reinforced falsetto circles around the rest of Softest Destroyer coming out to take a starring role on the track. It is a pensive mediation on self-manifestation that inspires that which it evokes.
The gaze shifts outward on ‘Clock,’ a track that centers the power that others hold over us by failing to see their own value, and ‘Blood and Breast Milk,’ a spoken journal entry that merges the personal and public, reflecting upon self and those spotted in moments of vulnerability. Coming back to the self, ‘Lives There Too’ draws upon the energy of youth and a gaze of wonder that is often lost in experience. Carol conceptualizes Softest Destroyer as an encapsulation of the power that devotion possesses and how it “can ultimately be the catalyst for our own self destruction.” This manifestation of love and truth is a forceful introduction to a fully formed artist and woman, bent on creating and destroying.
Stream Softest Destroyer below and catch Carol on April 18th at The Plough & Stars or April 27th at Corner Art Room.