Track-by-track Track by track: Coach Party, ‘Caramel’

This is our sarcastic celebration of the punchline “well at least you get to do what you love” when having any conversation ever about how impossible it now is to sustain life as a band who enjoys anything less than mega-success. The devaluing of recorded music, and the shift of focus away from music itself towards dumb videos and view counts has really fucked us all over. But, hey, at least we get to do what we love for a living. Well, not a living… but, y’know, I guess we are technically alive? That counts for something.

After getting off on a fairly negative (albeit pretty groovy) foot, this one is a much more sincere celebration of how fucking great it is when you go and see your favourite band live: when the set list just kills and it’s mosh pits, crowd surfs, fists up, non-stop singalongs, or whatever it is which makes the synergy of band/audience absolute perfection for that time and place. This song has no job other than to serve our live audience and make sure they have an amazing time. It’s such a moshable little creature and we just love playing it. Like all our songs, we never really considered it a single, but thankfully it did a cracking job at introducing the world of ‘Caramel’ as the first release from the album. Well done, ‘Girls!’

Of all the ‘Caramel’ songs, this one is probably the one which (musically) most connects us to our early days as a band - simple chords, nice tune, uptempo without being thrashy. And it’s maybe no coincidence that it’s also the only song on the album which looks back in time with a kind of longing for things to be like they once were. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that the future felt more certain and goals more attainable, and with that came a certain amount of self-confidence which in the current day can be really difficult to find.

I’m not sure if we’ll ever run out of things to be self-critical or feel self-conscious about, but in this one we basically ask the question of whether it’s okay to have (and/or act on) basic natural instincts in our anything-but-natural world and lives. Should we instead be committing to being either sea-dwelling, language-free hunter-gatherers, or universe-ruling omniscient robots? Is it okay to be in-between? You’ll be shocked to hear that we’re not sure.

Who’d have thought we could write a love song? Well, we kind of did it. Or at least, we wrote a song about being into someone who you don’t really know and has no idea you exist, and the best you could ever hope to achieve with them is to embarrass yourself in a pub by walking up to them with the intention of saying something pretty cool, but only managing to come up with “I really like you”.

This is a reminder to ourselves that it’s not only okay, but actually cool as fuck, to just do your own thing your own way, no matter how much the dweebs (bringing that word back) surrounding you might think you’re a fucking weirdo. The metaphor here is being at a club on your own just having a sick time without caring what others might think of you, but the point is that you can be that person in any situation, and it’s your fast-track way to achieving what you want to achieve, with a stylish disregard for external opinion.

When you’re having a bad time, in most cases it’s gotta be the worst thing to actually open up about it in an honest way with people when they informally ask how you are. They won’t get it, and at best they’ll offer advice in a way which means well, but in reality just adds fuel to the idea that most people can’t possibly know what you’re going through or how to make things better. Whether you talk about it or not, you feel like you’re completely alone, so your entire being is there to make sure you say nothing other than “yeah I’m cool” and just be done with that part of the conversation. Cue: ‘Fake It’. 

Following on kind of nicely from track seven, this one touches on how everyone else seems to know what’s best for you in your times of struggle, and how sometimes it feels like the right thing to go along with their advice if it makes them feel good, even if you know it’s actually the wrong thing for you to do. So, you do it, feel worse, and then feel even worse because people around you assume you must be feeling better because you’ve taken their advice. It’s quite a paradox.

The intention of this track is to spur people on to get shit done. It’s as if there’s something wired into us which physically pushes important tasks out of the positive parts of our brain and tells us that “if it needs to be done, then please, for fuck sake, don’t do it”. Like, why do we even have a word for procrastination? If we were a species which functioned properly, it wouldn’t even be a thing. What seagull says “meh, I’ll go swooping for chips laterrrrrrr”? They don’t; they see the fucking chips, and they swoop. It’s all about having purpose. We need to have more purpose and swoop for those chips.

Regret is one of the most painful ‘Caramel’ subjects. We all love this song so much, because it’s so painful, and the pain makes it real. To sign off our second album with this level of honesty is really satisfying, and it kind of acts as a “thanks for listening” finale. It was a very organic process from bedroom-demo to what you hear today on the album. And, whilst we would have loved for this song to be a single, it’s also kind of perfect that it’ll be heard only within the context of the whole album, and reserved for those who are willing to invest their time into listening to the whole thing.

‘Caramel’ is out on 26th September via Chess Club. 

Tags: Features, Coach Party