•
Rating: I have always thought that Jim Morrison was far ahead of most of his contemporaries and that snippets of his lyrics were meant also (or especially) for people of future generations. So, in my own small way, I hope you'll forgive me if I make the line "Carry me Caravan, take me away…" my own, to illustrate the effect that the Sinclair cousins' band has on me.
Their fairy-tale jazz-rock with strongly bucolic hues, their crystalline and sunny melodies that lubricate even the most progressive parts, making them flow fresh and vital like a high mountain stream, and the great class with which they venture into the most exquisitely pop episodes, literally manage to carry me away. Not so much in space, but rather in time.
A sort of delightful Proustian madeleine, the Caravan, champions of the more accessible spirit of the "Canterbury Scene", have the power to make me relive sensations and emotions from my childhood and adolescence where amazement and curiosity, even for the most insignificant things (which, in reality, it’s good to remember, are not insignificant, not even now), wrapped the days in a perpetual enchantment.
Listening to "If I Could do it All Over Again, I’d do All Over You", becomes, for me, a tour into the past: songs like "And I Wish I Were Stoned/Don’t Worry" and the medley "With an Ear to the Ground you Can Make it/Martinian/Only Cox/Reprise" have the same naive exuberance, fervent hope, and sweet anguish of a boy falling in love for the first time or preparing to explore a mysterious forest. The joyful title track pairs with "Hello Hello" and in their immediacy and light-heartedness, they are as clear as the eyes of a child can be. The "tiny" "Asforteri", seems to be a real counting rhyme used when designating the boy who, in hide and seek, had to find all the others.
The Caravan also know how to create more "mature" moods: "As I Feel I Die" is a progressive gallop where organ and guitar run wild, and in the fantastical "Can’t be Long Now/Francoise/For Richard/Warlock", the long jazz-rock digression is flavoured with sax and flute, making the piece resemble an intricate and surprising hedge maze.
The delicate conclusion of "Limits" brings me back to the present, but when this present becomes too heavy or pressing, I know I can always retreat here, into this album. It is important for me to remember how, as a child, I looked at the world and what can I tell you: "Take me Caravan…Yes, I know you can".
Loading comments slowly
