Pop music is a game of reinvention, a stage on which artists walk a tightrope between honoring the work that won them an audience and changing themselves enough that no one accuses them of going stale or rehashing past glories. Caroline Rose may have begun their career making music steeped in contemporary folk and Americana, but when they dove deep into left-field pop with their witty and satisfying 2018 album Loner, they found themselves at once joining the reinvention sweepstakes while bemusedly commenting on it from the ...
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Pop music is a game of reinvention, a stage on which artists walk a tightrope between honoring the work that won them an audience and changing themselves enough that no one accuses them of going stale or rehashing past glories. Caroline Rose may have begun their career making music steeped in contemporary folk and Americana, but when they dove deep into left-field pop with their witty and satisfying 2018 album Loner, they found themselves at once joining the reinvention sweepstakes while bemusedly commenting on it from the indie margins, a theme examined with even greater focus on 2020's Superstar, which sounded like a bid for a wider audience and an acknowledgement of the complex rules of the game. Pop reinvention often includes an album in which the artist bares their soul and acknowledges a dark period of their lives, and while Rose isn't truly a pop star, they've arrived at the place where they needed to reveal themselves in public on 2023's The Art of Forgetting. Rose went through a breakup with their partner that was followed by a deep depression, and this album is a diary of a period of sadness, doubt, rage, and confusion. The emotions will be familiar to anyone who has their life upended by the end of a relationship, but Rose approaches the themes in their own way, and the music borrows a great deal from the pop toolkit that powered Loner and Superstar while exploring darker atmospheres and dramatic instrumental flavors that owe more to indie rock than the electronic sheen of pop. (The fact Rose's breakup album has a lot more guitar on it than Loner or Superstar is telling.) Rose's best music has always felt open and utterly unafraid of revealing itself, and The Art of Forgetting pushes this to the edges; the struggle in their voice in "Miami" as they cry "You've gotta get through this life somehow" is too strong to be faked, and the inclusion of answering machine messages from their grandmother, which sound loving and concerned in the most familial way, make this seem so real it almost feels intrusive to listen. The sense of fun that buoyed Loner and Superstar is muted on The Art of Forgetting, but the intelligence and songwriting chops are very much there, and this music brilliantly merges form and content, an exercise in pop music as therapy that's intensely personal and easily relatable. This album leaves the door open for all sorts of creative possibilities for Caroline Rose, and it's as challenging as it is rewarding. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
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