The Art of Forgetting by Caroline Rose

I’m a big fan of Caroline Rose, the person. But they’re proving hard to pin down, musically. Their first album, Loner, was my #12 album of 2018, and it was tongue-in-cheek pop rock of the best kind. Then their sophomore album, Superstar – #21 in 2020 – was polished up like a gemstone, more pop, less rock. And now they’ve released a great third album, but again reinvented themselves into something else again.

The “rock” side of them has reared its head again, this time with a little garage and grit thrown in for good measure. The Art of Forgetting is a great album, on par with the other two. But because of these shifts they’ve made on each album, I think they’re having trouble finding their audience overall. Or maybe that’s just how it looks from the aging peanut gallery over here.

The two videos that have been released from the album, the above for the song “Miami”, and also “Tell Me What You Want,” are something of a marvel as well. The “Miami” video (“CHAPTER ONE” as it says at the beginning of the video), shown entirely in reverse, depicts Caroline and a companion in a night of fun and debauchery. Halfway through the video, the marquee overhead reads “THANKFUL FOR YOU.” The “Tell Me What You Want” video is the literal exact opposite, in video form. It starts where the “Miami” video ended, but this time moving forward through time (starting with “CHAPTER TWO”). It depicts the same events as shown in the “Miami” video, but this time Caroline is alone, drunkenly going through all the same motions they went through with the companion (in reverse). Drinking until belligerent, staggering around and falling into a pool, most of the letters on the marquee halfway through have been removed, leaving only “F O O L,” ending the story in the hotel room where Caroline then masturbates to, presumably, the memory or dream of the companion shown in “Miami”. The video ends where the “Miami” video began, with a hotel-room CRT TV tuned into television snow. Directed by Sam Bennett, the pair of videos make for a great story, posing more questions than providing answers, in a provocative way.

I suppose Forgetting is similar – Caroline tells a deeply (seemingly) personal story throughout the album, interspersed with answering-machine messages from their grandmother and other found-artifact noises, such as the starting and stopping “KA-CHUNK” of a tape deck. It makes for a wild ride, and one hell of an album.