Carlon : Johari Window in the City

By Lindsay Wallace
If you’ve never heard of Carlon, now is the time to give them a listen. Refreshingly, this New Jersey quartet’s new album Johari Window has quite literally broken every cliché of the indie rock scene. The first chords of the album instantly pull you into their meditative yet provocative world of atmospheric reverberance where you can just “put your guard down, breathe and follow through.”

This blues rock/folk band was clearly not afraid to step out of the dull indie guitar rock scene and create music of sheer beauty, vigor and quality that sustains throughout the entire album. Carlon simply cannot be compared to any other band out there right now and instead draws influences from 1960’s and 1970’s bands like Pink Floyd and The Beatles.

As lead singer Ryan McGlynn explains to MTV News, “We made this album with more of an intention than just being immediately easily accessible.” Basically, if you don’t get it at first, give it another listen. (pull)The band’s purpose isn’t to be the “next” anything. As McGlynn elucidates, “As soon as you say you’re like another band, you loose your individuality and identity.”(/pull) The transcendental poetic soulful sounds from “Red Rover” immediately hit a chord inside you, with the powerful lyrics, “Red Rover, Red Rover send a good spirit over/Reap hope out of what they sow/Take a life in your hands/Form a line, make a stand/Sob like you mean it when you confess/ ‘I’m too good for the bad I’ve done.’”

Their haunting sounds and moving lyrics will fill you with emotion, particularly during the song “Where the Driveway Ends” as it takes you back to their roots – the band’s name is a tribute to singer/guitar player Michael McWilliams deceased brother. “My brother, he’s gone, so I got to be strong but I hope to see him someday.” In order to understand their musical ambition, you have to look back at Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and movie soundtracks from John Barry and Danny Elfman.

McGlynn admits, “I grew up as a huge Beatles junkie. Eventually I found my parents old vinyls and I was an eight-year old kid listening to Dark side of the Moon hiding under the covers, hearing the laughing and scaring myself shitless but doing it again the next night.” Carlon fervently embraces what they grew up listening to, which means their sound lives somewhere between Dark Side of the Moon and John Barry’s Goldfinger soundtrack.

Each of Johari Window’s twelve tracks effortlessly flows into the next, without diminishing into something dull. The band’s natural ability to evoke raw emotion is aided by their firm appreciation for film soundtracks.

McGlynn adds, “I listened to John Barry’s Goldfinger soundtrack, and I thought, ‘This is awesome’, how he just builds suspense. A lot of music for movies really milk the ability music has to evoke emotion. It works out well having that as an influence because if you want to write a sad song, that’s how you do it.” If you, like everyone in this generation, missed out on the music scene of the 60s and 70s — this is the band to pay attention to right now.

If you haven’t heard Johari Window, get on it. Now.

Carlon is a band built on relationships, both present and past, and the result is deliberate rock music that strives to explore them. With a resonant, classic sound, Carlon creates heartfelt and haunting moments that are somehow familiar to all of us. On March 17, 2009, the band released Johari Window (Ropeadope Digital), a 12-track LP that clearly demonstrates the breadth of the band’s vision, musical drive and talent. Executive Produced by Pete Francis (bass player of Universal recording artist Dispatch), produced by Carlon and Ross Petersen (engineer for Bruce Springsteen, Muse, John Mayer) and mixed by Dan Huron (TV on the Radio, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Johari Window was recorded in a 20,000 square foot warehouse space in Fairfield, New Jersey. (pull)The sound of the album reveals the influence of great collaborators and a space that became part of the band over time.(/pull) Lead singer and rhythm guitarist Mike McWilliams notes that the band’s approach in recording the album reflects a maturity the group worked hard to develop: “We’re proud that we recorded the album ourselves in our own rehearsal space – we didn’t go into a sterile studio, we did it in a place that we made our home. On earlier records, it seems like we just made individual tracks and hoped that they would come out okay. But on this record, we set out to create a specific atmosphere – we learned how to do that in the warehouse better than ever before – and as a result, the music we wanted to create just seemed much more possible than ever before.”

While the material for Johari Window is drawn directly from the experiences of all four band members, the album is just as much about Carlon learning how to communicate with one another and reflecting on what they went through while working to record the album. Bassist Jared Pollack recalls, “Something we asked ourselves from the very beginning wasn’t ‘How can we learn to make new music with one another?’ but, more importantly, ‘How can we communicate with one another during the creative process, learn to try different things and make personal compromises for the collective good.” Drummer Milo Venter adds, (pull)“During recording, we lost our minds. But, our minds came back. We got our vision across and we achieved what we set out accomplish: to just make real music in a real environment. We’re proud of what the last year has taught us.”(/pull) When asked what Carlon sounds like, the band can become pretty uncomfortable. Lead singer and guitarist Ryan McGlynn explains: “I don’t know that there has been much of anything that we have listened to that hasn’t influenced the songs that we have written in some way. If we hear country in what we’re writing, we’ll add a bit of country. If we hear something new or old, we won’t hesitate to quote it in our music. For us, it’s never been about trying to sound like anyone or anything in particular, just creating something that sounds good to us. Johari Window was the chance to share a dream of ours to create a whole album that was a piece of art to us, with each song depending on the next. We thought, ‘Maybe then other people will like the music, too.’”

Although Carlon was officially founded in the spring of 2005, the beginnings of the band go back several years. McGlynn first met McWilliams down at the Jersey shore back in the summer of 1998. The two started playing and writing together almost immediately and continue to co-write most of the band’s songs and lyrics. Around 2002, Pollack, a friend of both McWilliams and McGlynn, had been working summer jobs down at the Jersey shore. Jared soon joined the other two playing bass and the three eventually began playing together whenever they could. It was clear to them that it was time to start a band; all that was left was to find a drummer. A few years later, McGlynn started music classes at Raritan Valley Community College, where he met Venter. The two hit it off and, after Venter played a rehearsal with the others, Carlon was finally complete. The band selfreleased a 4-track demo, Day Two, in October 2005 and a 7-track EP, Suburban Heel, in October 2006. In looking back at the past few years, the present with Johari Window and the future of the band, McGlynn assures us that Carlon will always seek to achieve more in its music: “As long as we continue to challenge ourselves, we’ve learned through this album to appreciate and enjoy our work, especially if its flawed and reflective of the change we went through while recording. There is an overall lesson in the process: not everything turns out the way you may have wanted it to turn out, but, when you start to appreciate that, you just want to do it again and better the next time. Maybe that’s why I can actually listen to this album.”