Sounds From The Junkshop #39 - Carrie

 

"Who's there? You'll never know..." - Carrie - Tricara

Another one of those bands who put out a great album that the world missed because the timing was totally wrong for it, Carrie were formed from the ashes of mid-'90s rockers Some Have Fins with American singer Steve Ludwin and Australian drummer Bruce Pawsey recruiting ex-EMF bassist Zac Foley and guitarist Dennis Dicker to complete the line-up. Sonically the group were cut from the same half-Britrock half-Britpop cloth as Ash but with a much more dark and twisted Placebo-esque lyrical streak running through them.

Like quite a few people I suspect, it was Carrie's fourth single, California Screamin', released in the summer of 1998, that turned me on to them. A sublime slice of Weezer style power-pop about dreaming of the Golden State when you're stuck in a bedsit in Dalston on a rainy Tuesday night, it should have been the song to break them chart-wise and got picked up and played by Radio 1 as a potential summer anthem in waiting but unbelievably it stalled at a lowly number 55 and the writing was arguably on the wall for them.

It didn't stop me picking up the band's album Fear of Sound when it crept out in the autumn with minimal fanfare (I suspect that Island, their label, had pretty much given up on them as a commercial prospect after the failure of California Screamin' to crack the Top 40) and I'm glad I did - it was definitely one of the better albums of that decidedly underwhelming year.

Although Carrie specialised in what appeared to be sublime and sunny power-pop, there was a very dark lyrical undercurrent running through their songs - album opener and the group's second single Molly was all about the joys of dating a gender-bending dominatrix with lyrics that would've made Brian Molko blush ("Passiveness turns her on, when she's strapped on") while its follow-up Breathe Underwater was about being rescued from drowning by a supernatural marine goddess and Joseph appeared to be about Damian-style Satanic children.

There were a couple of sly nods to Britpop and grunge scattered in - the skittery Leek Out ("I radiate acid and rain while all my worries leek out") was like a darker cousin of Shed Seven's Dolphin and the brutally heavy riffage of Hurt For could almost have been Bleach era Nirvana. The group's debut single The Birds was reminiscent of the Pixies as well but for some reason was cut off the album. Best of all though was the sinister lurching Tricara (at four and a half minutes the longest track on the album) which is kind of what you always wanted grunge to sound like - heavy, ominous and with a killer hook.

Unfortunately by this point, the die was very much cast - with no label promotion behind it, Fear of Sound tanked. Soon afterwards, Island went to the wall and Foley left the group to join a reformed EMF (he would sadly pass away from a drug overdose in 2002 at the age of just 31). Ludwin and Dicker would persevere onwards with the group recruiting a female singer (Lucy Johnston) and mutating into Little Hell who would put out a couple of similarly skewed punked-up albums (albeit a bit heavier than Carrie) and tour with Ash (Ludwin even wrote the song Warmer Than Fire for Tim Wheeler and co) a lot and may well feature on a Sounds From The Junkshop somewhere down the line.

It's a real shame that the world didn't pick up on the wonderful twisted weirdness of Carrie as they were too busy losing their heads over the blandness of the Verve and the similar groups of snore-merchants who sprung up in their wake. Fear of Sound is a real forgotten gem of an album that deserves to be rediscovered (happily it seems to have recently been added to Spotify) so go track it down and see for yourself. Sugar coated spite doesn't come much better than this.