Carta - The Faults Follow

  by Andy Cassidy

published: 14 / 10 / 2013

---

Review

Reading the press release for this ‘The Faults Follow’, my excitement peaked when I stumbled upon the following description of the album: “Paranoid inner-vacuum micro-dub and ruminative post-space hypno-drone.“ Almost every box in my taste checklist had been ticked – could this be the album, the one that I’ve been waiting nearly forty years for? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. ‘The Faults Follow’ is Carta’s third LP and their first to feature vocals on every song. The record was made during a difficult time for the band personally, and it shows in both the music and the lyrics. The album’s mood is reflective, reminiscent of Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’ or Laki Mera’s ‘Fool’. Despite powerful lyrics and vocals, the album’s strength is, for me, the depth of emotion Carta achieve through their instrumentation: droning tape loops, throbbing bass-lines and intricate guitar motifs fuse in an unusually evocative swirl of sound. The album opens with title track, ‘The Faults Follow.’ The song is a perfect mood-setter for the album as a whole, with brooding lyrics, throbbing yet subtle waves of bass and subtle instrumentation combine to form a superbly hypnotic piece, which is balanced perfectly between the Doors and Joy Division. My favourite track on the album is second track,’ The Iowa Fight Song’. To my ears, it’s a work of absolute genius. The track’s lo-fi production gives the piece an airiness and scale which allows its sound to expand beyond the deliberately claustrophobic feel of its peers and yet remain deeply menacing. Featuring by far the best vocal performance on the record, ‘The Iowa Fight Song’ benefits from being sung in a slightly higher register than the remainder of the album, creating a vocal which is almost Wayne Coyne/Neil Young-like in its execution. That slight strain in the vocal creates a true sense of yearning which is impossible to escape, despite the spaciousness of the song as a whole. ‘The Faults Follow’ is a highly accomplished album, taking its influences as much from early post-punk bands like Magazine to more contemporary acts like Stars of the Lid. That this is an album born out of pain is abundantly clear throughout, but it is never sentimental or mawkish; instead, Carta have turned their pain into an eminently listenable and massively enjoyable piece of work. My only criticism of ‘The Faults Follow’ is that the printers have misspelled “Theremin” in the liner notes. When I have to be that picky, I know an album is a good one.

Track Listing:-

1 The Faults Follow
2 The Iowa Fight Song
3 The Hollow Greeting
4 Header
5 The Reapers Are the Angels
6 Failure to Thrive
7 The Last Name of Your First Love
8 Morse Code
9 Sargasso
10 Saragossa
11 Paper Suit

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/cartamusic
https://carta.bandcamp.com/

Label Links:-

http://saintmarierecords.limitedrun.co
https://www.facebook.com/Saint-Marie-R
https://twitter.com/StMarieRecords
https://www.youtube.com/user/stmariere
https://instagram.com/saintmarierecord
https://plus.google.com/10115674474082