Album Review: Connan Mockasin – Caramel

For his second album, Caramel, Kiwi psych-popster Connan Mockasin headed to Tokyo and the East Asian influences can heard almost immediately.

The record’s first track ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ is a spacey instrumental, rich with distorted human vocalisation in the background; its closing ritardando melting perfectly into Caramel’s title track. Meanwhile, the peculiar punctuation of ‘I’m The Man, That Will Find You’ is almost as intriguing as the track itself. The caesura in the title breaks the sentence up awkwardly, and yet in the song the lyrics are sung in full flow. The break in the middle seems to be an interjection from another song, and makes the track sound like a mash-up.

‘Do I Make You Feel Shy?’ might just be Caramel’s highpoint, a great duet lushly filled with female vocals, softened drums and dream-like soundscapes. The long cascades of ‘It’s Your Body Pt. 1‘ – the first entry in a five-part suite that sits in towards the end of Caramel – seem strange and out of place at first, and by no means would one associate it with being about the tragic death of a close friend of Mockasin; though the realisation certainly adds to its poignancy. By the fifth and final segment of ‘It’s Your Body’, a Japanese influence is abundantly clear; with samples used from Mockasin’s time there. These samples eventually blend – via an ingenious question and answer – into Caramel’s closer: the sensuous ‘Roll With Me’, which sees Mockasin making bedroom eyes at anyone that will listen.

Caramel might not be an immediately endearing listen but it’s a rewarding one. A record to be consumed from start to finish – it’s coherency and flowing nature being one of its greatest assets – put in the hours though, and it’ll leave a lingering sweetness on you.

– Coco Wong