-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal *
ARTIST..: Crash City Saints
ALBUM...: Are You Free?
GENRE...: Indie
STYLE...: Shoegaze, Indie Rock
YEAR....: 2017
LABEL...: Saint Marie Records
ENCODER.: FLAC 1.3.1 -8 -V
BITRATE.: 908 kbps avg
QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / 2 channels
SOURCE..: CD
TRACKS..: 12
SIZE....: 327.90 MB
URL..: http://www.facebook.com/crashcitysaints/
- TRACKLIST
1 Ice Cream Headache 2:56
2 Smile Lines 3:50
3 Weirdos Need Love Too 1:31
4 There's No School Tomorrow 4:45
5 Use Once Then Dispose 3:34
6 Spirit Photography 6:44
7 Act 2 4:13
8 Dawn Of A Bright New Nothing 3:40
9 Annabella 2:57
10 It's Not A Party Until Someone Breaks 1:00
Your Heart
11 The Hour Of The Wolf 7:00
12 Harbor Lights 6:56
Total Playtime: 49:06
The best parts of MBV, Smashing Pumpkins, Galaxie 500.
Crash City Saints are back with the long awaited follow up to Glow In The
Dark Music, which inspired rave reviews back in 2010, with single "Out From
The Storm" winning Song of the Day honors from KEXP. The band says their
music sounds like a sandblaster spraying sugar, but we say it sounds like
everything great that's ever existed.
Are You Free? might be the best shoegaze-influenced album released all year,
and yet it's so much more than that. The album's 12 songs have more hooks
than a lazy Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman, more hooks than an english
phonebook, more hooks than the VHS section of your local thrift store, more
hooks than the lyrics to the world's second-favorite Blues Traveler song. At
times, Crash City Saints sound like a powerpop band in shoegaze clothing.
'There's No School Tomorrow,' a song that prompts the equation GBV+MBV=CCS,
might shower us in sparks, but it grooves like The Cars.
Every band has a history, and the history of Crash City Saints is a litany of
missed connections and infidelity, a series of false starts and crushing
disappointments. In this sense, Crash City Saints are just like the rest of
usùyou'd think they were cursed if their music didn't sound like it was
touched by the gods. And yet they haven't given up. In that sense, they are
special.
They're from Kalamazoo, Michigan. This means they sing about going to 7-11,
not going to brunch. Are You Free? gallops from strength to strengthùsongs of
ice cream and car crashes, the end of school and the end of existenceùbefore
ending with the elegiac 'Harbor Lights.' You have to admire that album
titleùanglophile enough to reference an iconic UK sitcom, American enough to
wonder if freedom still exists.
'Annabella' evokes memories of Siamese Dream, as does 'Dawn of a Bright New
Nothing' of Heaven or Las Vegas, and 'Weirdos Need Love Too' of Glider, and
all of this is wonderful. Most songs these days sound like nothing. Crash
City Saints don't sound retro as much as inspired. These aren't influences;
they're talismans to ward off the darkness. Just listen to 'Act 2.' What do
you say about a band that's been able to take the best parts of MBV, Smashing
Pumpkins, Galaxie 500, cut out the worst parts and make an album of 12 great
songs? You say Crash City Saints are brilliant. You say that they are vital
and delirious. You say thank you.
*
Releasing a concept album of any type is a big and daring leap. Will people
be able to detail the story (if the concept is narrative)? Will the story get
in the way of the music? What about the other way around? 'Crash City Saints'
have previously stated there is a narrative kind of concept behind the album,
and at times while listening to 'Are You Free?' I was lost as to what (if
anything) was actually going on, but then I realized that its concept lies
beyond the realm of just a narrative. Over the course of the album the band
swiftly (and at times intellectually subtly) incorporate and throw influence
and nods to the American music underground of the nineties. There's grunge,
dreampop, alt-rock, dance and electronica, shoegaze and many moreà This album
is a musical exploration in concept rather than a boring 'he does this, then
she does that' kind of structure that tends to drag down and drown many
'concept' albums. The song writing is strong, although at times relies too
heavily on formulas used on previous songs, even if it is a kind of
throwback. The mixing and production (done so by Elliott Frazier of Ringo
Deathstarr) is of course a brilliant, but also (if you listen to a lot of it)
a well-rounded and respectful throwback to the music of the 90's. Listen for
an interesting story (accompianed and helped along by interesting lyrics),
great instrumentation and playing, and a reminder of the brilliant and
nostalgic music of a few decades ago, achieved through production, mixing and
sound.
*
The band, Crash City Saints, has been around a while, and the ambient rock
trio from Kalamazoo, Michigan hard sealed their comeback in the shoegaze
scene with their 12-track release, "Are You Free" through Saint Marie
Records, the same record company who helmed Amusement Parks on Fire. The
album is the band's follow-up to 2010's "Glow In The Dark Music."
Like other modern versions of old genres, current shoegaze is still going
back to what's famous in the late 80's and 90's. "Are You Free?" is a solid
testament of the recurring sound.
*
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The path to salvation is whatever you desire it to be, sometimes it is filled
with razor wire and the half dragged painted signposts which declare the two
word legend of Keep Out with stern authority but with half a wink in the eyes
that dares the wanderer, the searcher of truth to climb over and see how far
they get.
At other times the pathway is clear, find the one thing that drives you and
keep doing it, for the lucky, for the fortunate, music is the only way to be
considered, like that beautiful stranger who entrances you with wild plans
and the urge to fly, sometimes salvation is exactly where it has always been,
in the arms of music.
The hero always finds their way to whichever path suits them best, and when
leaving the confines of the much maligned dead end town in search of that one
true meaning, for many the question at the end remains Are You Free?
Crash City Saints ask that question without fear or interruption, their own
particular highway having been the route of their own deliverance and the
autobiographical nature they have stamped throughout their new album Are You
Free?
It is a stamp that has blossomed into a tattoo, a trusted truth because it is
so indelibly inked forever and bleeds into the veins and mixes with the stuff
of the Universe. Salvation for the hero of the concept comes from imbibing
from the Madchester scene, the sound of the early 90s before the world seemed
a much more darker place, musically anyway, and for a band from across the
Atlantic to use this idea, the ideology not just the Manchester bands but the
echoes of riffs from groups such as the bountiful Smashing Pumpkins, lay this
album very much down as a prime example of a path in which to truly follow,
that the sign post is daring you to try something new again.
In tracks such as the opener Ice Cream Headache, Weirdos Need Love Too,
There's No School Tomorrow and Annabella the idea comes across with the best
of realisation, that the notion of the concept album is alive and living in a
different beast; a tumultuous storm of great rhythm and blissful memory.
Are You Free? If not, then you need to break the ties that bind you, slip
over the fence with the warning sign, after all, sometimes that notice is
just for show and Crash City Saints can point you in the right direction.
-=- SHGZ -=-
P.S.
** Thanks ***
*** BCC FNT IPC SSR ***
*** For Knowing Where The Music Is At ***
*** Props to CaHeSo, awesome Asian Indie/Shoegaze ***
*** And to FANG/HOUND for supporting all the Indie lovers out there ***
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* NuHS we miss you! *
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