If the UN suddenly issued a directive to replace all national anthems with popular music genres, and why not, there’s one country which would be bound to bagsy indie pop. Ever since about 1979, when Alan Horne founded Postcard Records, the independent music scene of Scotland has jangled to the beat of bands who shun calculated chart success for the joy of doing things their own way.
Few people know this better than Carla J. Easton, current keyboard player for the Vaselines (famously beloved of Kurt Cobain). Flush with inspiration after co-directing documentary film Since Yesterday, which charts the history of her home country’s all-female bands, she decided to pick up a guitar and channel her enthusiasm into her fifth album, I Think That I Might Love You.
But this is an album both distinctively Scottish in style and open-hearted enough to cross any border. Upbeat opener ‘Oh Yeah’ bounces in like a Labrador puppy via Easton’s enchanting voice, somewhere between Clare Grogan’s can’t-believe-my-luck coo and the Barbie-girl futurism of late hyperpop genius SOPHIE. An urgent piano rises from the song’s homemade production to drive its soul-pop stylings home, but the extra encouragement is scarcely needed. The whole thing is as exhilarating as a really good spin on a roundabout.
Though ‘Red Kites in the Sun’ is gentler in pace, when Easton belts out the album’s title at the chorus, her multitracked vocal makes a monument of its tentativeness. It’s a coming-of-age epiphany crystallised in song, the harmonica in the background moving between a toy-train toot and a yearning wail reminiscent of Bowie’s ‘A New Career in a New Town’.
‘Red Kites in the Sun’ isn’t the only track here which might bring Bowie to mind. Breakup song ‘You Might Be the Sun’ lances right through the heart with its beautiful imagery given life by the flutters and dips of Easton’s sung melody. When she brings it to a close with a cry of ‘I really miss you’ framed by non-lexical vocals straight from ‘Absolute Beginners’, it’s as if she’s realised that when it comes to heartbreak, poetry can only do so much.
Easton’s adventurous genre-play allows her to step from loss and longing into abundant joy, and there’s nothing more joyful than ‘Let’s Make Plans for The Weekend’. A transcendentally catchy hybrid of Prince’s staccato funk and Kylie’s sugar-coated night-on-the-tiles pop, flavoured with just the slightest hint of Scottish folk, its mix of nagging guitar, grooving bass, and little arcade-game power-up blips provide the perfect groundwork for a chorus which snaps and stutters and sparkles in syncopated bliss. You may well be reaching for the repeat button as soon as it’s over.
On another record it could easily stand as the undisputed highlight, but a rival to that title arises in the baggy beats of ‘Start It Again’, which wields its 90s revivalism to irresistible effect. Her voice is layered up into its own overflowing box of hooks, dispensing warm-hearted advice as the rattling percussion, bright acoustic guitar, and tinny trumpets build a danceable backdrop as generous as Saint Etienne’s sunniest work. Easton suggests that this is an album about friendship as much as love, and in its crisp compassion it’s nothing less than perfect.
Whereas so much of I Think That I Might Love You looks ahead, many of these songs also deal with what it means to leave things behind. ‘Never Really Wanted to Stay’ shifts from the new wave angularity of mid-80s XTC to a chorus so twinkly it should be classified as a dark-sky preserve. With a little more polish in the production you could imagine it filling a stadium.
Then we crash straight into ‘Pillars Crash Down’, which boasts a melody so diamantine and a vocal line so big and confident it could probably fill a stadium on its own. Demanding you blast the volume up and sing along through the tears, Easton’s favourite girl groups would kill for such a monster of a ballad as this, nailing the way that heartache can magnify gnawing regret into apocalyptic self-berating. ‘A tonne of feathers is still a tonne’, she sings, but you try telling that to her fellow countryman Limmy.
That’s not the only observation on the record which manages to linger long in the memory. ‘Moths to a flame are sometimes seeking out the pain,’ Easton concludes on the folky ‘Moth to a Flame’, its soulful strings scraping away in sympathy before the wheeze of an accordion solo steals the spotlight. To listen to it is to feel as if you’re resting your head on a loved one’s shoulder.
It could hardly make for a starker contrast with ‘Really, Really, Really, Really Sad’, which as the flippant title might suggest, is anything but. Co-written with insatiably inquisitive concept-album enthusiast Darren Hayman, it bounds along adorably, all perky little pockets of glockenspiel and tart-lemonade synth lines until Easton’s voice takes on a semi-sarcastic sigh at the chorus (not to mention the whooping backing vocals – rub it in why don’t you).
When it explodes in a howl of electric guitar and she pleads half-seriously over the top, you’ll wonder what anyone here is so sad about. The clacking rhythms of ‘Lift Your Head Up Kid’ are hardly any less good-natured, and with its chiming bells and organ sounds lending it extra colour, the effect is that of ‘Be My Baby’ arranged for an orchestra of wooden toys.
The album draws to a close with ‘If You Found a Thread’, a huge homecoming hug of a song which swinges like a sea shanty over lilting tides of acoustic guitar and warm bass. “We started writing about this idea of the red thread, the red string of fate” says Easton. “It’s the idea that you have more than one soulmate, platonic as well as romantic. You’re usually only going to meet people in your postcode, but with billions of people on the planet you’ve probably got soulmates all over the world.”
It’s no wonder, then, that the song’s sense of hope is so profound. “If you find me in this lifetime, then I’ve got your back,” she sings, and as a twanging pedal steel draws it to a close, the whole album is over before its smile has had a chance to fade. I Think That I Might Love You is a modest but dazzling testament to what pop music can do at its very best, and a compass and map for anyone with an independent spirit and a love for a well-turned tune. It might just leave you feeling a little more in love with the world.
I Think That I Might Love You is out now via Ernest Jenning Record Co. – order here
Carla J. Easton is currently on tour – buy tickets here:
26th May – Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds
27th May – Paper Dress Vintage, London
28th May – Low Four, Manchester
29th May – The Rum Shack, Glasgow
Carla J. Easton socials:
Website | Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Bandcamp
Review by Poppy Bristow
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