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Music

S Carey - 'Hoyas'

For the most part, listening to S Carey is not like listening to Drew Carey.

S Carey
Hoyas

Jagjaguwar, 2012

  • Critical conceit:

    "Bedroom Producer Climbs Friend's Coattails"

  • Real conceit:

    Well, what's wrong with that?

RATING:

TRACK LIST:

  • Two Angles
  • Avalanche
  • Inspir
  • Marfa

This is BON IVER.

Bon! Behave yourself. Please. Bon Iver is one of those guys who can never work out whether he is a band or a man. See also: Florence + The Machine.

And this is S CAREY. You can see why these two men might be friends.

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S Carey plays drums for B Iver, having first approached him as a sort of super-fan who apparently knew all the parts to For Emma, Forever Ago before anyone had even heard of it. So if B Iver's torso ever turns up in a dufflebag, I think we all know whose apartment the police will be turning over to find the missing genitalia.

S Carey has since decided that he is also a proper musician with songs and stuff, and wants people to hear them. Good for him. I have heard them. So you don't have to.

He's sort of going for this:

A lot of people have gone for that in the past few years: The blisswave of bedroom experimentalism wobbling out the frequency spectrum because they're not good enough at production yet to do proper drums. It seems like it's been in fashion for 500 years.

Though maybe in the final equation, it comes off a bit more like this:

But in between, there are moments of magic that really transport you. Transport you like this:

For the most part, listening to S Carey is not like listening to D Carey.

D Carey is much more the kind of guy you would listen to if there was no one else around and you just wanted some improvisational comedy to help you unwind. He's not the sort of guy you would listen to if you were really deadly serious about ethereal-yet-uplifting chillwave.

Whereas across these four fairly slight tracks, S Carey mainly comes on like a Small Black without the weekend nihilism, or, if you must, Sigur Ros playing with auto-tune in long-exposure heaven.