Cross-channel school-disco funkster
Who they?
By day, Joseph Carvell is a London-based double-bass slinger for hire, playing alongside artists such as Marker Starling and Daniel O’Sullivan. But by night, he is leader of the upwardly mobile bedroom funk project Pink Shabab. Already with two top-notch albums on the Cologne label Karaoke Kalk, Carvell’s creative process begins with him writing the bulk of the music from his room in Camberwell, before heading to the South of France where each track receives some added sparkle thanks to Parisian producer Emmanuel Mario, aka Astrobal.
Why Pink Shabab?
He makes a singular kind of funk – an ambient melange laced with romantic yearning and melancholy that feels appropriate to dance alone to. ‘San Junipero’, from his 2021 album ‘Never Stopped Loving You’, featuring Carvell’s swooning vocals is almost Balearic in execution. His diffident delivery, redolent of Lloyd Cole or Bernard Sumner, comes with a hint of maverick eccentricity a la Momus or Destroyer’s Dan Bejar. Pink Shabab’s pop sensibility is strong. The whole album sounds a hair’s breadth away from tipping into commerciality, but Carvell manages to pull away from the sure-footedness of pop.
Tell Us More…
‘Run Away’ has a hummable verse that, once welcomed in, will wreak havoc along the corridors of your mind like a mellifluous Trojan horse. It comes in four suites and is dotted with challenging jazz chords, wantonly shapeshifting every time you think you might have a handle on things. Carvell, it seems, has been unable to run away. A promising European tour was brought to an abrupt halt after his debut show in Zurich in early 2020. Expect live Shabab-ing in 2022, though!
‘Never Stopped Loving You’ is out on Karaoke Kalk
