Ask Carol Road Trips and Rocks Out During Their First U.S. Tour
Brooklyn, New York - June 28, 2024
Have you ever seen someone sing and play guitar, bass, a drum, and trombone all within one song? I have, and if you’re not already as obsessed with the Norwegian indie-rock duo Ask Carol as I am, you’re about to be.
In the intimate upstairs music venue of The Broadway, Ask Carol returned to Brooklyn to close out the first leg of their inaugural U.S. tour. I was in the audience at Williamsburg’s Our Wicked Lady for the second show of their tour, and I was just as excited to see them play again at the end of their journey across the states.
The first time I heard of Ask Carol was when I was scrolling through TikTok. I flicked through videos of cats, thrift hauls, skincare. And then I paused on a singer/guitarist and a drummer rocking against a picturesque Norwegian landscape of mountains and a field of cows. As they played, the cows and I huddled tighter to our respective fence and screen.
When it comes to music, I’m a simple woman. If a song has aggressive guitar, I like it—and Ask Carol’s crunchy, outdoors garage rock immediately drew me in. But their performance is anything but simple. The eponymous band is a duo made of drummer Ask and frontwoman Carol, but their sound is strikingly full and relentless. Both musicians multitask, with Ask on drums, guitar, and keyboard and Carol playing a split guitar and bass system, a trombone, and a drum . . . all while singing. Their earthy, raw sound is grounded in interwoven, looped rhythms that unfold like a flower unveiling petal by petal.
They kick the night off with “Nobody Knows” from their self-titled 2018 EP. Carol’s feet dance across a pedal board. She plays a riff, then loops it and adds another. Drumstick in hand, Carol strums her guitar, the motion sweeping to pound out a beat on a single drum as she strums again. Behind her, Ask is on the drum set—and guitar. Both of them have really gotten the strum/drumstick technique down. The layers of their music are distinguishable instead of being a wall of noise, which is hard to achieve in a small venue.
Played live, “Nobody Knows” has taken on the intensity of the band’s shift in tone when they reinvented their sound during the pandemic and tested out their new music on a bovine audience in their CowChella concerts. (Question of the day: Do cows have built-in rock on! horns?) Although nature is Ask Carol’s most devoted audience, they’re more than comfortable on stage.
When a technical problem with Carol’s pedal board happens mid-song in “Darkest Hour,” she pushes through the song with confidence despite having to adjust her playing. It might’ve been the pedal board’s darkest hour, but it wasn’t Ask Carol’s. After taking a break to fix the pedal board, Carol explains they’ve played roadside shows outdoors in the desert and the mountains and fields as they’ve toured the U.S., and clearly the pedal board is tired and ready to go home.
“Smiling All Day Long,” with its relentless beat, fuzzy riffs, and moody lyrics, matches the band’s signature neon yellow and black punkish color scheme. On the western-twang tune “Desert,” Carol brandishes her trombone, sweeps her long hair over her shoulder, and plays a droning melody that blends with the textured guitar riffs. Forget the cliché combos of peanut butter and jelly, yin and yang, Mario and Luigi. Trombones and electric guitar belong together, too. Honestly, I’ve never seen an audience so excited about a trombone—and I was a band kid in high school.
Photo via Ask Carol
The trombone makes its appearance again on “Tonight” and adds wailing intensity when looped underneath Carol’s guitar shredding. I can tell why the cows like their music. It’s mesmerizing. Riffs upon riffs, sound upon sound. The songs fold into themselves with each added layer. Closer, tighter, compact and yet expansive because of its limitations. Come closer, it beckons. And “Come Closer,” a standout song from their 2022 debut album AC I: Control You, is a highlight of their set.
Ask Carol walks the tricky tightrope of keeping a consistent sound without all of their songs sounding the same. Each song reveals a little more depth of their fluid sound, hard-hitting one moment and lingering the next, that shifts even within each tune. And they’re not afraid to reach outside of their repertoire—Ask Carol pays homage to Jimi Hendrix with a spirited cover of “Manic Depression.” On “No Regrets,” their sound expands and simmers, the relaxed rhythms taking their time to stretch out. Then it attacks, recoils, strikes again. Ask Carol ends the show with a t-shirt toss into the crowd during “Mountains of Cash,” a song with a mini audience sing-along to a drum beat.
Before their first U.S. tour, Ask Carol were already confident musicians who have played on an international stage multiple times, but somehow they reached an even higher level of performance in the three months since I’d seen them. Their last show is just as strong as their performance was at the start of their tour, and there’s an extra sense of ease and joy and celebration. Despite crossing the country and playing outdoor sets between shows, they have energy to spare—proven by Carol shredding with her guitar behind her head.
When I look behind me at the end of the show, I note the audience has moved from the bar in the back of the room to cluster close to the stage. I wonder if we, the audience, are now the cows. If so, I’ll happily stampede my way back to Ask Carol’s stage when they return to the U.S. this fall for the second part of their tour.
