caroline @ St Luke's, Glasgow, 7 June

The second LP by South London octet caroline is a wilfully messy affair. At the base of every track there seems to be a fairly straightforwardly pretty post-rock song, but momentum falls away jaggedly, there’s audible shifts in recording locations and every instrument seems to be in the process of falling out of time with the rest. It’s a bit like watching someone build a Broken Social Scene Meccano kit, only to realise towards the end they’ve lost a couple of pieces; there are bits flapping about and you get the sense that it may all fall apart, but it’s infinitely more interesting for it. More than anything there’s a willingness to show the songs forming before your eyes; a deeply earnest record that is as deeply earnest about making a record as it is about anything else. It adds up to one of the most undoubtedly beautiful records of the year.

However, what works to gorgeous effect on the album, played in full here, is curiously un-affecting live. The messiness is a bit too composed, too precise, lacking the spark and energy that it’s wonkiness may collapse in on itself. It’s the most bizarre thing, where the record feels more live than them actually there in front of you, The magic in the beautiful naivety of the album replaced by a dead-eyed precision that makes the spindly ‘U R UR ONLY ACHING’ or the cobwebbed glow of ‘Beautiful ending’ fall oddly flat. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of the sublime amongst this; the rapturous conclusion of ‘Two riders down’ is astonishing, the twin strings of Magdalena McLean and Oliver Hamilton concocting this churning glow of hope at the centre of the track’s riotous howl of grief. 

The gig doesn’t feel like it truly clicks until the final three songs of the night, but it really is spectacular when the group get a little looser. ‘Coldplay cover’ comes with the full tale of it’s recording (two songs played simultaneously in adjacent rooms with an engineer gradually moving from one to the other), and an attempt to replicate it, with the band setting up in two groups, McLean crawling between the two mic in hand. It improves upon its recorded version, the two groups driving each other into something far more forcefully, their respective interlocking harmonies working to sumptuous effect. ‘Good morning (red)’ is the only nod to their previous work, and it’s clockwork guitar chimes and swooning strings channel a wounded optimism that still feels like caroline’s mission statement. But it is closer and highlight ‘Total euphoria’ that shows how good caroline 2 can be live. It’s a thrashing, white knuckle lightning storm live; stuttering drums and gnarled guitars wound with ever tightening tension. Even the surge of blown-out bass that perversely wrong-foots on record only pushes them further, the band seeming to charge with it, finding the ramshackle ecstasy they do can hit like few else, but has evaded them elsewhere tonight.