RACECAR - Pink Car

It presents itself as pop, but it keeps shifting shape: it slips away, swerves, ripples, sparkles. And it does it all with means that sit outside the industry's usual axis.

"Pink Car" is the second album by Racecar, a trio from East Lothian, Scotland, who craft their visions at home, self-finance their projects through crowdfunding (with support from the public agency Creative Scotland), and still dream of strings, horns, session musicians: theirs is the ambition of people with a clear vision who nurture it from their own living room, fully aware that realising it in full requires greater means. And indeed the record - largely recorded in their own home studio - is an example of bedroom rock that plays out on an expanded scale, without ever falling back on lo-fi mannerisms or naif posturing.

The recognition earned by their debut "Orange Car", recorded entirely within the walls of singer Izzy Flower's home and rewarded by the BBC with two track of the week honours, gave them momentum and ambition: "Pink Car" is an attempt to raise the bar, keeping the same creativity but with more elaborate means. A budget of twenty thousand pounds allowed the band to bring in outside musicians and an experienced orchestrator, aiming for arrangements with a broader instrumental scope without disowning their homemade origins.

Starting from a few solid cornerstones - a proudly independent spirit, a fizzy and playful pop flair, a clear pull towards electro and funk - Izzy Flower, Robin Brill and Calum Mason handle genres like interchangeable modules, never losing their bearings. Affinities pile up, but none ever takes over: the record has the lopsided, sly swagger of The Chap and something of the dazed theatricality of Fiery Furnaces. At times it seems to flirt with the hyper-charged electro-funk of Knower, yet here and there it also seems to recall the fractured remains of folktronica (Zammuto, Diagrams, Gablé), or the elusive, chameleon-like prog-pop of Finland's Rubik. A mosaic of echoes, mostly unconscious no doubt, that track after track takes shape and becomes a language of its own.

Many songs start from a seemingly straightforward idea and then warp. "Got You Into It", "Fall Leave" and "Whenever I" sound like ADHD versions of power pop, but with a hyperkinetic drive and a saturation of colour that, for anyone familiar with the field, naturally brings to mind the madcap power/prog of Crying. "Zephyr" rides along in 7/8 as if it were the most natural time signature in the world, finding room for a driving bassline and violin lines that push the outro towards almost Pentangle territory (or Stereolab? The two styles seem to intertwine, and Izzy Flower's clean voice somehow recalls both). "Inevitable" starts from an indie-pop skeleton before exploding into an orchestral section and then shifting direction once more with a closing rap - one of the record's most unpredictable and disorienting turns.

But there's also room for stillness and for a more rarefied aesthetic, as in "Metronome", which moves slow and hypnotic between suspended vocals and tree-like reverbs, evoking the ethereal art-pop of Aurora. "Remains" instead explores the opposite direction, with electronic distortions mixing with moments of almost danceable clarity, pulling between industrial and electropop. Every track pushes the boundary a little further, yet without the whole ever risking to feel like a collage: the coherence lies not in the styles that follow one another, but in the way each deviation feels necessary, in the fluidity with which everything changes without warning.

"Pink Car" is a progressive pop record that doesn't need to announce itself as such. It proves it song by song, finding its most precise form in freedom and independence - from stylistic fences, from bedroom-pop clichés, even from independent labels themselves.

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23/04/2025