In one sense, Cath Carroll makes some of the most confrontational alternative-rock music around. At a time when even major labels are willing to shell out cash money for the privilege of releasing some very outre sounds, you may ask, how can a musician break new ground? Carroll’s method: softness, not harshness. The transplanted Briton, now a Chicagoan, purveys a soothing, percolating groove that shares some theoretical foundations with the work of the lush pop proselytizers in Scritti Politti and the Pet Shop Boys. But her music is also a farrago of curious influences: Brazilian dance pop, the Manhattan Transfer, Herb Alpert maybe, and (mostly because of Carroll’s potent low-volume vocalizing) Sade. She’s found a genuinely new frontier: underground MOR.
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Can she pull it off? On her solo album, England Made Me, released in England on Factory, and on new songs in progress at Flat Iron Recording here, she marries that music to redolent, deliberate lyrics that range from woozily sensuous daydreams (“Watching You”) to gritty urban portraits (“Beast on the Streets”) to chilly romantic landscapes (“My Cold Heart”) to lacerating political rants (“England Made Me”). England Made Me includes everything from Brazilian percussion tracks recorded in Sao Paulo to a lyrical kiss-off to the Stones’ “Miss You”: “Where are those Puerto Rican boys who are just dying to meet me?” The result is an extremely intelligent mood music. Carroll, whose almost preternaturally soft voice whispers no nonsense, makes no apologies for it: “I’m somewhat irked by the fact that it’s sometimes thought that to be alternative then you have to create a certain sonic structure. In the same sense, if you want to be meaningful you have to shout a lot. Well, I can’t shout a lot. Some people accuse me of being vague or not saying anything. It’s possible to say a lot more without necessarily bellowing.”
She came to Chicago in 1990, for love. It was during Big Black’s last British tour that she’d first met guitarist Santiago Durango, who ended up leaving the band to go to law school and is now an attorney. Leaving England for Chicago might not have been as hard as it seems. In the title song of England Made Me–the title comes from a Graham Greene novel about middle-class life during the Depression–Carroll sings, “Every railway line around here is full of stations with no towns around them / Nothing here works and it’s getting worse.”
