Karo

When the singer/songwriter Karoline Schaum - alias KARO - released her debut album SING OUT, HEART! on the Karlstadt label NORMOTON, her audience, the press, and her fellow artists and colleagues were likewise enthralled. While some regarded her as the German Feist, others compared her to Cat Power, but all were smitten with amazement at the originality of her simple, direct songs and her genuine and haunting voice. Whoever witnessed one f her many shows of the last three years could not escape the magic of these songs and KARO's euphoriant stage presence. For the recording of her latest album, HOME, the autodidact locked herself up in one of the old bank vaultsin Wformer Posthallen. The peculiar, out-of-world-sound behind a metre-thick steel door inspired her to create a new sound and more complex forms of expression. Thanks to the support of Hardcore band SHOKEI's Daniel Gehret (bass) and Matthias Labus (drums), KARO's music has gained in vigour. But even so, the tremendous intimacy and honesty of the nine tracks featured on HOME, which will be released on NORMOTON on 22 February 2013, prove that KARO has stayed true to herself and to the vision of her music. Instead of striving for elaborate arrangements,KARO relies on her ability to capture the pure substance of each of her songs. Using only a single microphone, shemanaged to meld vocals, guitar, bass and blasting drums into a union of warmth which is in no way inferior to a studio recording. If the album's first guitar-and-vocals track sets out with the familiar restraint, from the second track onwards, bass and drums drive the eerily hovering vocals, blazing the trail with a curbed brutality reminiscent of the American Slowcore band LOW. And then its the calm moments again, which carry us off into the depths of KARO's universe of ideas where so many of us feel at HOME.