Pink Car: the ambition that was born in the living room :: Ondarock reviews

It looks like pop, but changes continuous skin: shelves, skids, cracks, sparkle. And all with means out of axis compared to industry.
“Pink Car” is the second album of the Racecar, the Scottish trio of the East Lothian who creates his visions at home, self -finance crowdfunding (with the support of the Creative Scotland public agency) and meanwhile dreams of arches, winds, sessionists: ambition is that of those who have perspective and feeds it starting from their stay, with the awareness, however, that making it fully requires wider means. And in fact the disc – largely engraved in one's own Home Studio – is an example of Bedroom Rock playing on a scale expanded, without ever giving in to mannerisms lo-fi and posed naive.

The recognition obtained with the debut “Orange Car”, entirely engraved within the walls of the singer Izzy Flower and awarded by the BBC with two Track of the Weekgave them impetus and ambition: “Pink car“ It is the attempt to raise the bar, keeping the same creativity but with more articulated means. Twenty thousand budget pounds have allowed the band to involve external musicians, an expert orchestrator, and aim for arrangements with an enlarged instrumental breath without denying their home origins.
Starting from some solid corner stones – a proudly independent spirit, a sparkling and playful pop inspiration, a clear projection towards Electro and Funk – Izzy Flower, Robin Brill and Calum Mason hander genres as interchangeable modules, without ever losing the compass. The affinities are hungry, but none prevails: the disc has the sghembo and sly passage of The Chap and has something of the excelled theatricality of the Fiery Furnaces. On several occasions it seems to flirt with Knower's hypervitamin electro-funk, but here and there he seems to recall even the fractured remains of the folktronica (Zammuto, Diagrams, Gablé), or the impregnable and chameleonic prog-pop of the Finns of the Finnish Rubik. A mosaic of echoes, certainly mostly unconscious, which traces after trace takes shape and becomes its own language.

Many songs start from an apparently linear idea and then deform. “Got you into it”, “Fall Leave” and “Whenever i” sound as ADHD versions of the Pop pop, but with a hypercinetic thrust and a saturation of colors which, for those who are familiar with the field, is spontaneous to associate with the daring Power/prog of the Crying. “Zephyr” travels on 7/8 as if it were the most natural time in the world, finding space for a pressing bass and violinist lines that push the tail towards almost Pentangy territories (or Stereolab? “Inevitable” starts from an indie-pop bone and then explode in an orchestral section and still change direction with a final rap-one of the most unpredictable and unreachable hubs of the disc.
But there is also room for recollection and for a more rarefied aesthetic, as in “metronome”, which moves slow and hypnotic between vocal suspension and arboreal reverberations, evoking the ethereal art-pop of Aurora. “Remains” instead explores an antipodal direction, with electronic distortions that mix with moments of almost damaging clarity, with a shot between the industrial and the electropop. Each trace moves the border a little further, without however all risks looking like a collage: consistency is not in the styles that follow one another, but way in which each deviation seems necessary, in the fluidity with which everything changes without notice.

“Pink Car” is a progressive pop disc that does not need to proclaim it. This is shown by song by song, finding in freedom and autonomy – from stylistic fences, from clichés bedroomseven from independent labels – its most precise form.

23/04/2025