Carpool – My Life in Subtitles | Album Review
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SideOneDummy
After working in several movie theaters throughout college, I've spent my fair share of time in projection booths. My favorite was filled floor to ceiling with old movie posters, each haphazardly taped on top of the other, with the oldest posters just barely peeking out behind the latest. The shelves were filled with odd memorabilia (Jurassic Park dinosaurs, B-list celebrity standees, promotional shirts for forgotten A24 films), and the lights were permanently low.
Carpool’s latest album, My Life in Subtitles, takes me back to that projection booth. The Rochester band’s sophomore album captures the feeling you get watching a movie through a small glass window—the sensation of watching something bigger than you, something that excludes you, but something you still can peer in on. Projection booths are niche liminal spaces, rooms caught between an audience and invisibility. Like the complexities of the projection booth, this album operates from above, crafting story and sound from a secluded vantage point, and that all starts on the first track.
Following a melancholy piano introduction, Carpool throws the listener directly into their lead single, “Can We Just Get High?,” a song the band dubbed the spiritual successor to their 2020 entry to the emo canon, “The Salty Song.” On the surface, “Can We Just Get High?” is a full-force rocker that feels like the rush of a sweaty beer pong win. The song has an anthemic quality that makes it feel like the performance a hot new pop-punk band would blast through at a house party during their minute-long cameo in a 2000s dramedy. The track practically demands to be chanted along with, featuring a binary chorus of, “Love me / hate me / can we just get high?” The band intersperses that kinetic energy with musical tricks that push the entire song into overdrive — extended guitar notes, signature Carpool screams, and a solo from lead guitarist Tommy Eckerson that flows like a knocked-over Miller High Life.
In the music video, the band leans into the chaos through a disorienting backyard rager and a well-placed Animal House reference executed by bassist Torri Ross. Directors Kevin Flanagan and Christian Payment capture the surreal panic of the song through a musical fantasia of beers in the tub, high-stakes poker, and falling into a pool with your suit and tie on. The band followed this video up with one for “Open Container Blues,” a slightly more mournful track with a stunning feature from Briana Wright of Cliffdiver. While the song balances on frustration and tragedy, the video intersperses lyrics with glowing footage of the band’s joint tour in the summer of 2023. A joyous reminder that at the end of the day, Carpool will always be for sharing smiles with friends.
The final music video released for My Life In Subtitles was for “CAR,” a post-hardcore departure from Carpool’s typical pop-tinged emo sound. With this tonal shift in music came an accompanying change in visuals. Directors Kevin Flanagan and Christian Payment moved away from the absurdity of “Can We Just Get High” and the camaraderie of “Open Container Blues” for something darker – a nightmare designed to knock listeners off-kilter and keep them on their toes. Soundtracked by his own screaming, the video depicts lyricist/vocalist/guitarist Stoph Colasanto trapped on the roof of a building and being chased through a parking garage by cloaked cult figures. For an album as thematically broad as My Life in Subtitles, the diverse array of genres and emotions depicted through the music videos do a good job representing the vast emotional complexities found throughout these songs.
Between the first stretch of songs of this album, I found myself asking, what does it mean to feel doomed? Not be doomed; just feel it. This theme is familiar territory in Carpool’s lyricism; their debut album, Erotic Nightmare Summer, was tinged with this urgency and pangs of frustration. The band’s follow-up EP, 2022’s For Nasal Use Only, offered a synthier, sunnier companion to the TV-static melancholy of ENS. It also provided a five-song glimpse into Carpool’s growing sonic capabilities, suggesting that the band was ready to fly.
Perhaps no one understands that sensation of soaring doom more than Icarus, the mythological boy who flew too close to the sun in search of freedom. Shifting away from broken-in emo and power-chord pop found in the opening stretch of the album, “Kid Icarus” sits comfortably in the middle of the record as a highly visual song with a winding, stadium-like delivery. It’s a song that takes up the whole room, with Stoph Colasanto envisioning himself as Icarus, affirming that, “If I could fly towards the sun, I would fly towards the sun.” Not to be confused with soaking up the sun, don’t get it twisted. Like many Carpool songs, the music and lyrics weave two conflicting emotions, in this case, an aerial melody paired with free-falling notions of self-doubt. That tangible longing and sense of closeness with something just out of reach echoes my projection booth memories. Do you join the crowd? Or do you keep your turmoil to yourself?
Of all the tracks on the album, “Thom York New City” was the song I found myself replaying the most: listening to it in the still of the night, listening to it while lying flat on my back and staring at the ceiling, listening to it while walking home from seeing friends. “Thom Yorke New City” is a hell of a final act. Lyrically, it illustrates the repetitive balancing act of choosing to look on the bright side even though that bright side is never guaranteed to happen, moving forward with a knowing and predicated voice. Sonically, it mirrors the flight patterns of “Kid Icarus” and calls back to the comfort of prior Carpool songs with a song-shifting drum fill from drummer Alec Westover.
But that can’t be where this album stops, so it isn’t. Instead, My Life in Subtitles ends on punctuation, a small button in the form of “Every Time I Think of You I Smile.” This is the musical equivalent of the lights slowly coming up in a theater as the credits roll. After an album full of contemplating what it means to feel doomed in your own life despite your best efforts, this final track relies on memory to offer evidence that the doom isn’t forever and that the sky will clear eventually. This song bookends the opening titular track, forming an infinite loop of gray uncertainty turning into wavering assuredness, and then back again.
The credits end, and I am left in the projection booth, accompanied by the soft clicking of the projector. I turn it off, stretch my legs, and leave to get the broom to sweep up popcorn, reflecting on what I had just watched. I feel as if I have truly witnessed a full story play out through this album, one chronicling the ups and downs of Stoph Colasanto’s recent life and the distance between reality and subtitles—the difference between what’s said and what’s shown.
From my view in the projection booth, I can feel the atmosphere created by this album. I immediately knew the script, the characters, and the setting, but I also didn’t know them at all because I was only watching from afar. Years of songwriting, musical experimentation, and life have gone into this record. While other Carpool projects have looked back or yearned forward, My Life in Subtitles looks from above. This is an album where the entire band soars. With its earnest lyricism, acrobatic guitar solos, and genre-shifting delivery, My Life in Subtitles is an album with altitude.
Caro Alt’s (she/her) favorite thing in the world is probably collecting CDs. Caro is from New Orleans, Louisiana and spends her time not sorting her CD collection even though she really, really needs to.
