On the Carousel with Convenience Store
The new single from Melbourne duo Convenience Store is but the latest in their uncommonly prolific year. A band unafraid of boundaries and endeared to experimentation, “Carousel” finds them pulling beauty from pared-back arrangements and haunting ambiance.
Melbourne band Convenience Store tend to deal in singles, a habit they explained to me almost a year back: “we've always wanted to put out single after single, just to show that we're still working on what our sound is.” Experimentation is the name of the game for Jack Hill and Nick Baker, much more interested in exploration than safe bets and monotonous sets. They’re prone to take eclectic detours on their search for that sound, but the pair never seem to stumble on that perfect form — if anything, it seems that Convenience Store are the wide net they cast. A little acoustic, some solid shoegaze, electronic infusions and outsider influences, all at once.
The duo’s new single, “Carousel,” finds the pair on the atmospheric edge of their wandering sound. Soft synths usher in softer vocals, their lovelorn telling taking on something altogether greater: the knowledge that nothing will ever be the same. “Last night she left by train, I saw her in the window,” sings Baker, the struggle to meet her gaze — first evasive, then icy — a story in its own right. That carousel turns, the journey illusory and destination ever-distant, as the delicate mood builds to a quiet chaos. The single, alongside the striking video from Jamie Barry, show a band brimming with confidence in their vision.
It’s been a particular busy year for Hill and Baker. “Exit Sign / Lathe,” their first single of 2022, arrived in March with a sweeping self-directed music video in tow; “Wake,” an tender acoustic meditation, arrived with a clip of its own just one month later. “Bruise” and its corresponding clip arrived in May, and an acoustic arrangement, “Bruise (Portland Version),” debuted with new visuals in June.
Their second to most recent single, July’s “Fan Death,” came complete with their most ambitious accompaniment yet — a clip filmed by the duo in the Cretan city of Chania, making the most of the striking architecture in the storied Old Town. Slow zooms, stilted dancing, grainy inserts and melodramatic performance: it’s essential Rage-core. At this point, they’ve got that down to an art.
This preoccupation with visuals isn’t just an extension of their music: it’s the other half of their steadfast audiovisual approach. The video for “Exit Sign / Lathe” employs both dynamic and static mediums, the handheld gaze finding beauty in Melbourne city scenes, liminal hallways, and a quick homage to Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels. Baker sprinkled lyrical allusions to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up in the verse on “Peas,” which speaks to their tastes both creatively and cinematically.
The music video for “Carousel,” helmed by “Peas” director Jamie Barry, runs with this tradition of rich imagery, patiently expanding on the cold feeling beyond the facade. The clip centres four intercut stories that speak to loneliness, vouyerism, and the habit of keeping up appearances. It’s a bleak telling, beautifully shot by Barry and Ryan Bell, who isolates each character in their own intriguing bubbles.
One man is caught up in a self-destructive circle; another is shooting his fifty-sixth take for a film, Cows Have Four Stomachs; a woman is reduced from forlorn to a smiling, spinning fairground clown; and a commuter simply can’t shake the feeling he’s being watched. It closes on an image of hopeless futility: a driver borne round and round as the day turns to night, in control but unable to make the change. Baker’s quiet refrain — “and on the carousel she stays, and on the carousel she stays…” — makes for a mild climax, the kind of unseen crisis that happens every day, masked by actions and hidden with veils.
It’s another tender observance from a band fascinated by the intersections between perception and fantasy. Their familiar tag of SMILE, YOU’RE ON CAMERA speaks to both the routine of surveillance and the fantasical lens of cinema, a juxtaposition typified in the way their perceptive gaze on “Time to Enjoy” and “Salt Water” abut the dreamlike allusions of “Peas” and “Right Here.” The sharp relevation of “Wake” — “though you dream, you have to wake” — seems to sink in on “Carousel,” a stark end to a tender illusion.
STREAM CAROUSEL
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