to tell you the truth, i considered pulling the same trick that i pulled last month. i love the queen moo record, and i’ve listened to it over and over again, each time finding new little moments: a harmony here, a bass fill there. in a lot of ways, faint sounds of us hanging out is kind of like an art museum. if you want to, you can buy the ticket, walk through, and come out on the other sides in a breezy half hour. but if you wanted to, you could have spent the whole day in that museum. and on certain paintings/tracks, you could have spent an hour just exploring its corners. and everything that i just said could also easily be applied to crag mask’s second album, ‘bend’.
if you follow me on instagram, then you know i like to take the piss out of crag mask. i like to call them “crampus” or “crag musk”. i like to compare them to gunther from friends. and i do all that nonsense because (1) i really like the band, and (2) they don’t take it too personally. and that last part is something that has stuck out to me, and i don’t quite know how to explain it. for example, their music is quite serious. it’s well-considered, technical, and heavy. it deals with themes of alienation and frustration. even their name is slightly spooky (whatever it means). but on the other hand… on the other hand, the album’s got a sketch of a man with a pyramid hat hugging a dog. their social media presence is filled with things you wouldn’t normally associate with a heavy, hard-rock band. a goofy promo video. a silly tweet.
all of this gives crag mask a certain knowable, but unpredictable, quality. go on — try to write a fake crag mask song. it can’t be done. it never really sounds right. i’ve tried to do it because i thought it’d be funny to record on a snippet of a “lost” crag mask song, but i could never get it right — the rhythms didn’t feel natural, the voice felt forced, the tone didn’t match. and yet, when you throw on bend, all of the songs feel completely intuitive and natural. it’s idiosyncratic, but it never feels like it was planned. it’s thoughtful without being over-considered.
anyways, i’m not going to try to re-litigate what makes bend such a good album, and one that i’ve listened to so often. i already wrote about that. instead, i just wanted to try to articulate why this album has stuck with me more than some of the other fantastic releases of july. it rocks hard, it sounds great, and it’s perfectly sequenced. but you know this already. go re-listen to it today. 🙂
