Tceremony metaphors, tortured similes and outright cliches are, ahem, ten a penny in right now’s pop lyrics – so how refreshing to have Zach Choy, bandleader with Canadian indie curveballs Crack Cloud, writing with such wit, chew and the sort of completely scanning rhyme you get in the most effective sea shanties or youngsters’s literature. That isn’t faint reward: it’s deceptively exhausting to write down lyrics this rhythmic, this rounded, a lot much less so whereas making trenchant feedback in regards to the very capabilities of artwork.
Crack Cloud have had a shifting lineup over the previous decade and two earlier albums, and the band match Choy’s ambition, enjoying a singular sort of maximalist storage rock decked out with synths, saxophones, strings and singalongs. But he stays at its centre, a drummer-singer with a historical past of habit. “Highway to restoration, an early speaking level,” he notes drily of the press (together with the Guardian) who latched on to this traumatic story when the band broke by way of round 2017, and Choy is so conscious of how private narrative and popular culture are constructed.
Virtually aggressively tuneful, The Medium pits the pleasant however shallow world of pop and rock (“It’s a track about Billy, yeah he’s gone downtown / However to his shock Sally’s not round” is his withering summation of the genres’ lyricism) towards punk, which finally ends up being simply as commercialised: “Who would’ve thought that the socially reclusive / Could possibly be exploited for business utilization?” Crack of Life is a sarky knees-up about humankind’s vanity, to a lo-fi reggaeton shuffle: “Come all ye, be a part of us / Let’s all have some enjoyable / From microbe to the Matrix / We’ll outlive our solar!” However regardless of being jaded, Choy can’t assist however attempt to say one thing along with his music: “Overdose on pondering, yeah a casualty of artwork / Fountain of Bellagio beating in my coronary heart,” he sings on Epitaph. All of it makes for a splendidly grand album in regards to the massive stuff in life: artwork, household, and no matter else we must always do on this planet.
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