Formal introductions aside, where do I even start talking about Caravan Palace? They are the embodiment of good music presented in the form of a fever dream, whether it is through their highly satisfying discography, or obscenely questionable MVs with meanings that are highly debatable.
During the earlier days of Caravan Palace, they are well known for their work on utilizing Ragtime, a sub-genre of jazz which features a specific assortment of percussions and instruments that compliment each other to create something that rivals Swing in terms of how much it makes people want to dance. The most notable example of such a work is Lone Digger, which is a classic piece on the internet which the reader may or may not have stumbled upon accidentally (And we’ll talk about it in detail later on), considering it has a humble, humble amount of views, capping at 313M views at the time of writing.
Other than Ragtime, Caravan Palace also took influence from modern pop music groups such as Daft Punk, which would later create pieces such as Plume that features a formula that resembles Modern Electronic Pop, and obviously, they also contain the Caravan Palace charm within, which makes them all incredibly outstanding pieces brimming with personality and spunk.
Within most of their tracks, there will be no shortages of various instruments playing together to create a bold piece of music. Tracks may often shift from the lively recordings of instruments, to the deep vibration of electronic sounds, creating a clear outline of sections within the track. And of course, as all instruments are constantly making a run for the spotlight, the vocals are always present to give the track even more meaning and expression. “Rock It For Me” is one that would always be one of the best examples of their throwback when jazz was the hot thing, and every man is wearing a suit and a bowler hat out in the streets.
If you have no idea where to start, then just take a listen to their mix, here. I think it serves as a great introduction to their music as a whole.
Caravan Palace is a peculiar band, but their ability to create good music should not be undermined. They took on many ventures, both physically and musically, in an attempt to share their music to the whole world, and a colorful light to a dulling musical mainstream. Take your time, and understand the lyrics of Miracle to give yourself a new light in your life, or to analyze Moonshine to contemplate frustration. I’m sure most will find their music charming, if not inspiring. Hence, that is why I highly suggest the reader try out Caravan Palace's library of wonderful music.
<|°_°|>
Caravan Palace MVs in a nutshell
Music Review
Before I go in, I’m 100% sure Lone Digger will be on your mind if you’ve ever heard of Caravan Palace, but for the sole reason of me being able to do so, I won’t go too deeply into it(Although I find Lone Digger Interesting, but Moonshine is leagues above Lone Digger in terms of message, weirdness and chaos, so I’ll be focusing on that).Brief part on Lone Digger. While the song is high octane and pompous, it has brief moments of silence throughout the song for listeners to have a small breather before it quickly pushes to its chorus, and as for the music video itself, it is very mid 2010s youtube, where almost everything is given a greenlight, in this video there’s everything you can find in 2013~2017 YT, violence, sexual and most importantly weird, all of which are key essence of this music video.
Moving on to Moonshine, a 2020 Music Video by Caravan Palace, the song is about the assimilation process of a flat earther, about how a man slowly descends into madness as he finds himself believing in the flat earth theory more and more as days go by.
The lyrics of this song also resonate with the video seamlessly, singing about how sad and unfulfilling conspiracy theorists’ life are, as they seemingly refuses to connect to anyone or anything outside of their small bubble, afraid and paranoid of everything around them, and the way the video shows us how they start to take these sort of outrageous conspiracies seriously, which is through the belief of “If I can’t see it with my own two eyes, it mind as well does not exist.” Which was portrayed through the fly hitting the edge of the cup, the toy boat hitting the edge of the bathtub and the toy robot hitting the sliding door, of which I assume is Caravan Palace’s way of poking at the nose of those flat earthers you see online using children toys to explain how the world is flat, and these part are accompanied by childlike voices in the music video which makes it hit even harder.
Lyrics aside, the video is also filled with interesting stuff, i.e how the computer screen shown in the video is filled with only evidence of the earth being flat, a direct jab at the flat earth community being an insane echo chamber of pseudoscience. And since the video is taking on the perspective of a flat earth believer, the framing is done perfectly as well, as every movement and object has no curvature to them at all as they are all aligned perfectly flat on the floor, stretching all the way to the horizon (Interestingly, even the shadow and plane trajectories in the video are completely flat and in a straight line, which is what flat earthers tend to believe.)
Then comes the references, the bar at the start insinuates that there might be a connection to Lone Digger. But at this point you would think that it wouldn’t be, only for the ending to throw a 180 twist to you, telling you that indeed this is connected to Lone Digger, as the drink he orders in the animal bar is the exact same as the one shown in Lone Digger, and then the three cats shows up. The man’s position and stature also corresponds perfectly with the donkey in Lone Digger(Whether or not this is saying something, I’ll leave it up to you to think about it.).
Attachments:
