Music / Premieres
Video Premiere:
Convenience Store - Carousel
Convenience Store - Carousel
Their impressive sixth single for the year, today Melbourne duo Convenience Store have shared with us a first listen and look at ‘Carousel’, an enthralling meditation that flitters between dreamy electronica and art-pop whilst broadening the scope of the project’s expansive sonic world.
Since 2019, Nick Baker and Jack Hill have been crafting music together as Convenience Store, created with the personal and imaginative tinge that follows the bedroom-pop tradition (although in this case it’s basement pop) while also anchoring their music with an incisive flair of their own. They’re on one hell of a hot streak this year, with five singles already released - varying from polished to raw, poppy to ambient, and expansive to minimalist - and this time around on ‘Carousel’ we find them embracing contemplative and subdued dream-pop.
While picking up where previous single ‘Fan Death’ left off, with its atmospheric synth backbone and understated pop melodies, ‘Carousel’ opts to forgo the beat completely to make for something even more meditative. After emerging with soft strings and accordion, the track expands around Nick’s restrained vocals, which float carefully through the soundscape as it ebbs and flows around him. As the instrumental layers continue to swell and flourish, ‘Carousel’ begins to shift and refract, the atmosphere becoming more delicate and volatile simultaneously until the emotional potency of the track begins to overflow, bringing things to an alluring close.
Paired with a clip created by Melbourne director Jamie Barry and cinematographer Ryan Bell, we’re treated to a cinematic visual accompaniment that mirrors the track’s haunting yet hypnotic feel. Speaking about the track and clip, the band share “we set out to make a video that explores different kinds of loops and repetitions that are expressed in our song ‘Carousel’. The song itself uses music to ask some political questions about the tension between systems that repeat themselves and what might lie beyond those systems – there’s moments in the song with looping arpeggios that weave in and out of the rest of the arrangement; there’s an outro section where tense looping elements interact and build together, eventually unfurling as the vocal line distorts into a stretching digital tone. In Jamie’s video, these questions are visualised: there are four vignettes of characters caught in unproductive loops. The mechanics of their life seem determined and impossible to escape - there’s a fog that seems to blind them from seeing beyond the way that they live their lives in urban societies under the spectre of consumer capitalism.”
While picking up where previous single ‘Fan Death’ left off, with its atmospheric synth backbone and understated pop melodies, ‘Carousel’ opts to forgo the beat completely to make for something even more meditative. After emerging with soft strings and accordion, the track expands around Nick’s restrained vocals, which float carefully through the soundscape as it ebbs and flows around him. As the instrumental layers continue to swell and flourish, ‘Carousel’ begins to shift and refract, the atmosphere becoming more delicate and volatile simultaneously until the emotional potency of the track begins to overflow, bringing things to an alluring close.
Paired with a clip created by Melbourne director Jamie Barry and cinematographer Ryan Bell, we’re treated to a cinematic visual accompaniment that mirrors the track’s haunting yet hypnotic feel. Speaking about the track and clip, the band share “we set out to make a video that explores different kinds of loops and repetitions that are expressed in our song ‘Carousel’. The song itself uses music to ask some political questions about the tension between systems that repeat themselves and what might lie beyond those systems – there’s moments in the song with looping arpeggios that weave in and out of the rest of the arrangement; there’s an outro section where tense looping elements interact and build together, eventually unfurling as the vocal line distorts into a stretching digital tone. In Jamie’s video, these questions are visualised: there are four vignettes of characters caught in unproductive loops. The mechanics of their life seem determined and impossible to escape - there’s a fog that seems to blind them from seeing beyond the way that they live their lives in urban societies under the spectre of consumer capitalism.”
'Carousel' is out everywhere this Friday.
