Caroliner Rainbow Susans and Bruisins- The Cooking Stove Beast

Fiddle With A Heart Stuck In It
The Ballad Of Hamdrags
Follow The Mint Brute
Huge Gunset
Keel Over And Cursing
Brakeman's Ice Skates
Fixing And Mixing Cracked Skulls
Hannah's Medicinal Tick Collection
Fall Off The Wharf
Cooking Stove Beast
The Swoon Skirt Accomplishment


"I still can't think of a stranger band than Caroliner. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, Caroliner is a singing bull that lived once in the 1800's and told stories around lonesome campfires. Crap Hat Carson told me that Mittens Samdrags doesn't actually "sing", perse - rather, he "channels the singing bull" at each performance. And what a cosmic trip it is! Take Cooking Stove Beast, their fourth record - as you are hurtled through this dense, muddy world of the singing bull's stories, you can't help but laugh (albeit nervously) at the absurdity of it all.

Listen to Fiddle With the Heart Stuck In It, which opens up bass drone and a simple fiddle melody played on a Korean stringed instrument which seems to relay, "that's how they did it back in the civil war". Then you hear the first verse of Mittens' channeled vocals:

I need bad to companion my life
I give up the horse and work up a fuss
Now I got money and dirty hands
Before I wash I'll fiddle first

Ok, what does that mean?

Several other cuts on this album are hootenanny-esque, complete with banjos, mandolins, fiddles, and pots and pan percussion. Then we are side-swiped by a few quick edit interludes, ending up deep in the whirlwind drone of Huge Gunset with extra reverbed drums (recorded with cheap mics, yee-haw!), four tracks of extra distorto-bass played low and slow, coupled with guitar and synth dronesl Through this cacophony of sound, we begin to hear the deep-voiced, singing bull which once lived in the 1800's, recorded through a fan.
Mittens tells me that the mixing technique used on most Caroliner projects is one of throwing the faders up and making a few slight adjustments to the overall sound, but they mostly mix on "intuition". Gotta love that "intuition"! You know what they say - "your first mix is the best". Mittens reiterated that a good mix is one you are satisfied with, and Keel Over Curing is a great example of this wisdom, especially where their mixing technique is concerned. Each change of chord yields yet another change of mix, yet all the while a single drum track pans around in stereo and fades in and out aggressively.

Side two of Cooking Stove Beast offers a fast paced yet haunting little ditty called Fixing and Mixing Cracked Skulls. Here are two unique, definable sounds of Caroliner - one is the unusually high, distorted voice of the Singing Bull, along with the creepy old organ which graces many Caroliner records. This piece features a truly maddening, overly- repeated melody played on said organ which sounds like the soundtrack to an especially tragic Edgar Allen Poe tale. I originally thought that the vocals were run through a tremlo or leslie but Crap Hat Carson informed me that it was a mic technique that Mittens uses which consists of moving the mic between 1 inch and 2 inches from your lips...real fast! The vocal effect is quite unstable, yet dementedly effective for the lyrics:

Long births deep in women sat
The coming out the heads bleeding cracks
Dragging cloth skin and screaming ghosts
So that cud magic and place birth back

The icing on Caroliner's psychotic cake is that all of their records are wrapped in hand- made covers, each one unique. Spend enough time with their collected works and you may come to see the vision which is the Singing Bull."
-Scott Colburn, Gravelvoice