(2021) Mackin Carroll - Learning How to Swim  


Review:
Listening to Mackin Carroll’s stunning debut, Learning How to Swim, there is a real sense of intimacy almost as if you’re sitting on his bed furtively flipping through his journals. Across eleven tracks, Carroll details his love life – breakups and all; he exercises his anxieties, depression and childhood fears; and sings about waiting for his crush to finally come around. Raised in Los Angeles on a seemingly steady diet of Ben Folds Five, The Decemberists, and Bright Eyes records, Carroll blends those influences with some of Harry Nilsson’s quieter moments and even mixes in a little Americana for an inspired sound that lyrically seemingly manages to be both highly personal and extremely relatable at the same time. The album’s opening track which shares its name with the record title tackles his childhood depression, while “Black Hole Song (I Miss You)” details a breakup coinciding with NASA taking its first pictures of a black hole. While it’s difficult to single out stand out just one or two tracks here on an album crammed with great music, lyrically, Carroll is channeling brilliance on “Creatures of Habit” (“And if voicemails make you angry/Then why do you call back? /If colors make you happy/Why do you wear black… Well, if God just makes you mad/Why do you pray?”). The music – a comfortable mix of folk, Americana and indie pop – clearly and justifiably takes a back seat to the lyrics, the real drive of this album. “Vampires,” the oldest song on the record written when he was just 19 and heavily influenced by Wilco, shows a songwriting maturity far beyond what most decades older are struggling to achieve. Emotionally vulnerable without being too maudlin or earnest, on Learning to Swim Carroll manages to exploit his life, heartbreak and all; and exorcise his struggles with depression and anxiety for a powerful album that is as charming as it is personal.





Track Listing:
01. Learning How to Swim (3:40)
02. Black Hole Song (I Miss You) (3:45)
03. Anxious in the Alley (4:30)
04. Frozen Strawberries (2:58 )
05. Creature of Habit (3:59)
06. Intermission (3:49)
07. Not Even Hungry (3:55)
08. Vampires (3:19)
09. I Wish I Could Cry (5:01)
10. No Tiger (3:06)
11. Hangin' Out (3:23)


Media Report:
Genre: americana, folk-rock, indie-pop
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits