Careful's Pitch-Bending, Gender-Shifting Duet With Himself

One of my favorite parts about a duet is the intertwining exchanges and negotiations that happen between two singers. Sometimes that snappy dialogue can be playful and fun to listen to. Yet to me, it can be far more interesting when the song presents Rashomon-style shifts in unreliable points of view; each narrator has their own differing account, but the full picture doesn’t reveal itself until you hear them both together. Even more interesting when the singer delivers both sides of the story.

That notion comes into play on The World Doesn’t End, the upcoming fourth album from Eric Lindley -- a Brooklyn-based producer and multi-instrumentalist who records as Careful. Throughout the album, Careful explores an unraveling relationship between a man and a woman -- both voiced by him with the help of some gender-shifting, pitch-bending electronic manipulation.

And on the haunting “You Will Have To Kill Me,” Lindley’s warm vocals harmonize with his female counterpart’s fragile and lovely voice to great effect.

While difficult to parse the lyrics, you can still feel the dark impulses and sense of detachment in the two voices as they float above a landscape of icy electronics and synths. And because there’s such an alien quality to the female side -- recalling the equally soulful and robotic vocals of Polica’s Channy Leaneagh -- its easy to wonder if that woman is simply some sort of inner conscience in Lindley’s imagination.

Recorded entirely in his Bedstuy apartment studio in Brooklyn, Careful's latest album blends electronic music, new classical composition and pop, and showcases Lindley's craftsmanship and education (He has degrees in both physics and music from Dartmouth College and studied minimalist composition James Tenney.) The result is a spare yet melodic sound full of meticulously constructed drones, looping beats, and digital noise fragments that ping around the headphones. It's these kinds of subtle details that reward every listen.

Careful's upcoming album, The World Doesn't End, is out April 22 via Circle Into Square.