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Minimalist, dark, hypnotic, dense, on the sharp edge between "music" and "noise": this mini-album originally released on vinyl, then reissued on CD (with two bonus tracks) marks the debut of this interesting and promising band from Portsmouth: the Cranes. The sound formula, edgy, icy, at times lashing, manages to present a sound that is both compact and capable of dissolving and disappearing in spirals of pure industrial noise… this is the first stylistic reference, that is to say, what bands like Z’ev, DAF (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft), early The Young Gods (period “L’Eau Rouge”) on the industrial and ebm side have so far been able to achieve in terms of an intelligent use of electronics "inside" the traditional rock form, (and at times disrupting its canonical scheme); and such it appears when listening to the concluding track “Nothing In The Middle, Nothing At The End”, almost an epigrammatic manifesto, or “Fuse”: progression built like a sort of “upward spiral” (Siddhartha would say in English), to reach, like an ascending current, a sort of cathartic illumination. This is the backbone of several tracks included here, including those that reveal more the second reference: the dream pop of bands like Cocteau Twins, Belcanto, Talk Talk (“Focus Breathe” is a masterpiece of pre-dream-pop-industrial, with its guitar explosions/ignitions), yet dreams as if submerged by the icy winter of the ocean's vortices depicted by Dylan Thomas:
“With the man in the wind and the west moon; (…) /Under the windings of the sea /They lying long shall not die windily (…)/And Death shall have no dominion”This is the third and final reference: not musical, but literary. An apparently nuanced connotation, but in reality it structures the poetics of a group that, in this sense, reveals itself aligned with the poetic and literary sensitivity of certain Rock from Albion, linked to Romanticism, Symbolism, Decadent Poetry, and much more.
(Dylan Thomas - "Poems")
A powerful, paced debut and at times rough in its sounds, as sweet, soft, and melodic in the female vocals, almost fragile and sinuous with a deliberately “off-screen” voice, in the manner of the forerunners Suicide: conceptual industrial-wave, for which we could borrow the definition of “Existential Rock”.
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By Qzerty
The genius lies in the bass lines, and the perfect/precarious balance the Cranes manage to infuse in the rhythm section.
Alison's voice, like a lullaby, almost atonal, often in unison with her brother’s electric guitar, gives rise to dissonances that are more incestuous than ancestral, and therefore quite beautiful.
