The French group Caravan Palace pleased its fans with the fifth album “Gangbusters Melody Club”, whose recordings evoke a joyful invitation to the dance floor.
It should be remembered that the previous wave of swing did not spread to Slovakia. It peaked in 1995 -1998, rose in the USA and reached Europe. It was a pleasant refreshment of the music scene. It mixed swing with punk, rockabilly, folk, ska, reggae, alternative music and world music and introduced the world to exceptional bands such as Squirrel Nut Zippers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, 8½ Souvenirs, The Brian Setzer Orchestra and others.
In recent years, another wave of swing – electro swing – has been sweeping the world, in which the French group Caravan Palace is at the forefront. Supporters of this genre from the traditional camp probably won’t be very pleased with this group, because they mix swing with modern electronic music and pop. And that’s why, on the contrary, it became very desirable in the eyes of orthodox “electronics” for swing.
“Swing and dance electronic music have a common goal – to motivate people to dance. It forms a bridge that we are trying to strengthen,” the band said.
The band serves its fans a musical drink bursting with all the colours of house music, disco, ambient, hip-hop, trip hop and pours it into glasses with the inscriptions Django Reinhardt, Lionel Hamton, Fletcher Henderson.
Caravan Palace use acoustic instruments such as violin, trombone, clarinet, and vibraphone alongside electronic ones. They tend to provoke at concerts, especially through their singer Colotis Zoé, who often flies around the stage like a butterfly with her naughty moves and eccentric, burlesque Parisian outfit. She studied clarinet at the conservatoire, jazz singing, went to drama school, clown classes, language school and is an admirer of Ella Fitzgerald. Maybe that’s why the band’s repertoire also includes slower songs on the border between ambient and jazz.
Defying convention
Throughout their career Caravan Palace have consistently defied convention to become pop mainstays while keeping their cool, innovating their sound and refusing to follow the rules and sidestepping trends to forge their own fashionable path on which everyone is welcome. From Instagram to YouTube to the thousands of clips on TikTok set to the instantly addictive songs from their first four albums, their idiosyncratic soundscapes achieve the rare feat of being both leftfield and commercial.
The aim with this new album was to stay streamlined, yet the trio pack more influences than ever before into their elegant earworm songs. The jazz and swing for which they became famous over a decade ago is back with a bang, alongside their love of House, Electronica and Big Beat. The result is that the fantastically titled Gangbusters Melody Club sounds like an absolute blast. From the frisky, Deee-Lite disco of Mirrors to the rock’n’roll Raccoons, from the screaming brass-soaked 81 Special to the woozy Avalanches, it finds Caravan Palace twisting their trademarks into new shapes.
For 15 years, Caravan Palace have defied convention to become pop mainstays while keeping their cool, innovating their sound and refusing to follow the rules.
We carefully monitor music news on many not only preferred servers and try to give you the most objective view of the current music scene. This week, Caravan Palace came out with the best, which deserves the position of “Album of the Week” in our broadcast on the Mixcloud platform. Drop your worries and you can party elegantly along with us .)
NMR (foto: press)
