Carina Round - Slow Motion Addict

Carina Round may be a talented singer, but when she acts like a petulant girl who wants to scream and show off her range in the same breath, she’s not a very pleasant one. For the majority of her album Slow Motion Addict, she’s stuck in a blend of dance, rock, and pop¬—a rather large niche these days—and none of them work for her. Her voice, even at its fleshiest and raspiest, can’t compete with the drums and guitar at full strength, and her beautiful falsetto is fragile enough that it could drown in an inch or two of water. When she gets to her titular roots and slows the action down, the mellow tracks are mellifluous, and it turns out that for all her catchy production techniques, she actually has stuff to say. I’m all in favor of the hip energy of songs like “How Many Times” when they’re used properly, but the peppy pop presentation should do more than propel things along—it’s quickly forgettable, a cute throwback that can’t stand on its own. As for the title track, which jumps forward with its electronic ambiance, it goes too far with instruments alone: the name on the album is Carina Round, and without her, it’s just loosely associated sound. She pulls together a disparate song like “Gravity Lies,” a rock song that warps and riffs on the melody, and allows our hero to stop trying to be hypnotically perfect. Instead, her words roll as rasps and slide up and down with a screechy guitar—her scream fits into the oeuvre, so does the toy ray gun firing in the background. This track is far from perfect¬—so disparate it’s hard to listen to—but it pulls her out of slickness and towards reality. What Carina Round needs to establish is a voice: on some tracks she plunges below the sound, on tracks like “Take the Money” she’s post-punk aggression ala Pink, and then on basic rock like “Want More” she sounds like We Are Scientists. Where’s she seems most solid and most profound is with a soft quartet of songs near the end of the album. Beginning with “Downslow” (which does just that), and going into “January Heart,” the band starts to ease back so that the tender plucking matches her reedy singing. When the band does come in at full strength, it’s like ballast to send Carina soaring over the bass chanters. “The City” also keeps the instruments to a minimum; the occasional rip into the melody is what cuts her voice free. By her best track, “The Disconnection,” Carina is using her full range, coupled with classical instruments, and the swelling symphonic sound (modulated to match her own warbling) seems like the right fit. Maybe by her next album, she’ll have pieced it all together. (NOTE: I recommend that you listen to the versions of her tracks that she has placed on her website, www.carinaround.com. They're fantastic, but not the overly produced, overly pop versions on the CD.) [www.carinaround.com]