A friend recently admitted that she hadn’t listened to Caroline Says because the Austin band is named after a Lou Reed song (itself a sequel to a Velvet Underground song). My friend likes Berlin plenty, it’s more about the reference being too on the nose, too eager to broadcast a sensibility before the listener has heard a note. You can’t really blame a band to for sticking its foot in the door before you slam it shut by skipping to the next YouTube video or whatever, but Caroline Says’ sophomore album is anything but pushy. It’s almost funny how much the introspective whisperings of the project’s sole songwriter, performer, and producer, Caroline Sallee, do not sound like one of Reed’s most tragic songs. But No Fool Like an Old Fool does recall a number of other bands and borrow a few song titles. Reference points, it seems, are kind of Sallee’s thing.
The story on Sallee is that she moved from her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to Austin in 2013 to pursue a career in film and the following year put out a tape inspired by her interim travels out West. Titled 50,000,000 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong (after the King’s 1959 compilation), the record of gorgeous surf-pop and psych-folk songs was reissued last year as a prelude to No Fool Like an Old Fool. Sallee made the album as she was settling in Austin and gaining perspective on her hometown, all of which casts a dreamy, dreary feeling on the record. Informed by her new surroundings (a basement apartment where she could hear her crazy landlords’ every move), Sallee recorded the guitar, drum machine, and various other parts during the day and murmured the vocals at night. From its muted-color harmonies to its overly padded beats, much of the album sounds like it’s trying to hide in plain sight.
Even when Sallee fills her quiet rooms with troubled characters, she evokes overwhelming beauty and understated humor. In one of the record’s darkest moments, “A Good Thief Steals Clean,” Sallee coos in ominous reference to a love affair with a heroin addict (inspired by the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park), but her sentiment of half-knowing someone you thought you loved rings true well beyond the admittedly Reedian scenario she hints at. Over a drowsy drum-machine drone, she ends with this ironic but poignant metaphor: “But a person can love a song without knowing all the words/Some people even think words don’t matter much at all.” Perhaps the references strewn throughout No Fool Like an Old Fool are borrowed wisdom, but the crucial knowing wink is all Sallee’s. This is an album that sounds familiar but feels new in its specific way of manifesting dread.
That seems to be the case on the album’s first single, “Sweet Home Alabama,” a swirling, soulful, ’60s-ish homage to realizing you have to leave your hometown. Even as the song twinkles with its looping riffs and gauzy la-la-las, Sallee plods along in her sad little town until she realizes there’s nothing left for her. Like the other standouts on No Fool Like an Old Fool, the sad-happy juxtaposition on “Sweet Home Alabama” is perfectly balanced. Sallee does not wallow in overwhelming uncertainty, but it is something you can drop in on by listening more closely to the cloudy passages in otherwise sunny songs. With its conjuring of Parisian sidewalk cafes, “I Tried” hides someone falling apart just under the surface of its eternal breeziness, pausing the pop jangle just long enough to show a patch of grey.
Occasionally the songs feel a little less her own, recalling the sedated swoon of Real Estate (“Mea Culpa”), the cinematic folk of Grizzly Bear (“First Song”), or the updated surf-pop of the Drums (“Cool Jerk”). Initially off balance, the latter gives way to a less jittery interlude of dejected chanting that suggests how Sallee really feels. The way she’s able to inject these quietly pretty, happy styles of music with an underlying weariness and a clever touch is what makes No Fool Like an Old Fool stand out among the many musicians currently borrowing similar sets of sounds. Caroline Sallee isn’t any band’s mirror—she’s too busy reflecting herself, in case you didn’t know.
