RECORD REVIEW: Carb on Carb, Take Time (2024)

RECORD REVIEW: Carb on Carb, Take Time (2024)

if i, randomly, compiled a list of who i thought were the ten nicest people in the new zealand music scene (i have done this) and released it (i will not do this), i’m assuming most of you wouldn’t be surprised by Carb on Carb taking a pretty high spot. that’s ten nicest, not friendliest, not most likely to let me into gigs for free, i’m talking about selfless, genuine, human niceness. i’m yet to meet actually anyone who has anything seriously awful to say about the emo-indie two piece, which is something i can’t say for most of you. 

besides, you know, helping found Girl’s Rock/To the Front, one of the few actually worthy music organisations, and running the record label (Papaiti) which is single handedly preserving the entire history of manawatu-whanganui emo music (i’m serious. we had, like, a whole scene and everything. we from the west coast did midwest emo in new zealand long before you did. it’s rare for me to say nice things about my hometown but i’ll admit we have some pretty good music.), they’ve been providing backlines, getting people onto bills and making the effort to show up to shows when there'd be no one else in attendance otherwise. it was thanks to them that i got one of my first real gigs with my first real band, in a major festival in our capital city. we sucked, but still, they let us suck in front of a crowd.

their most recent album, Take Time, which released a few weeks ago, has become one of those beautiful slabs of rainy day music that hover over my head like an ill placed bowling ball. whenever i’m feeling down, and i really want to twist that knife and wallow in my own shallow sorrow, this is one of those albums i can put on to make everything feel worse and better at the same time. it’s like The Boy with the Arab Strap, if it didn’t have those weird dodgy songs in the middle, or anything by The Smiths, if they weren’t fronted by a prick. and i don’t even normally like emo music that much! i find 90% of it self absorbed and insubstantial. but maybe here, on Take Time, because the people playing the music are, you know, not awful people, everything they sing about seems genuine and heartfelt. they actually mean everything, it’s not just posturing. 

each track moves gracefully from one style to another; the pop punk lurch of opener 2009 and the almost Avril Lavigne sounding Thirtysomethings contrasts with the slower, American Football-ish Back where you’re from and ok bye, before closing on the stilted math rock of I Know The End 2. the guitar is never anything less then fist pumping-ly awesome and the drumming is some of the best you’re going to hear on a record this year, along with the kind of singing that reminds you that you really should be listening to something other then punk music, because, shit dude, when someone can like, actually sing, it makes everything sound like a choir of angels. beautiful, angst-ridden, emo angels.

i don’t know if they’d be happy with me calling them “beloved elder statesmen to a new generation of music”, but, fuck it. they’re beloved elder statesmen to a new generation of music. we’re a country that’s incredibly slow to mythologize any of our culture. the time in between the early nineties and now have always looked like cultural dead zones to the casual observer, but this is so far from the truth. we’ve only just starting to talk in reverent tones about the early 2000s Die! Die! Die! So So Modern post punk thing, so when are we going to realise that the people who got ripped off buying weed at camp a low hum 2013 are just as important as Don Mcglashan?  

anyway, i did really enjoy that album. i’ve procrastinated getting tickets for the wellington show they’re doing with Feshh in june, so hopefully they won’t sell out the tickets before my next round of government cheese comes in. hopefully i’ll see you there, because if that bill couldn’t sell out a show then there is something not right with the world. i’ll be wearing a full suit and tie and selling my autographs for 5$, and taking pictures with your babies for 20$. 

 

final score: **** and three quarters /5

  

~O.