if you’ve been following me on instagram, you know that i have something of a rivalry with crag mask. ok, well maybe not so much a rivalry as a one-sided conversation. some people may call this “heckling”, but my jokes at their amusement comes from a place of respect and admiration for crag mask. and sure, their lawyers may have gotten involved with a “cease and desist” letter, whatever that is, but i’m still legally allowed to buy + talk about the band’s new second album, bend.
if you don’t know crag mask, they occupy a little bit of a strange spot in connecticut. they’re hard-rock, so they don’t quite fit into the uhart/new haven indie scene, but they’re not exactly a metal band, either. they’d fit perfectly on a bill wit hellrazor, but hellrazor doesn’t play shows that often. this alienation isn’t lost on crag mask — their second single, “secret plane” is explicitly about this problem. and if this all sounds familiar, it’s because it was also pointed out both in a Flood Magazine article and a Post-Trash review. but see, here’s the thing — i’m not convinced that it is a problem. and maybe that’s not fair of me to say because i’m not in the band (or am i?), and i don’t know what it’s been like to hover between these two scenes, but i see it as something of an asset. crag mask — and maybe perennial too — have had the rare chance to bridge these two scenes that otherwise don’t overlap much. as a result, when crag mask released their album a day early on bandcamp, the ct-diy social media was flooded with crag mask excitement. in a scene that can be so fractured and divided, bend has been something that we can all agree on.
here are my three favorite moments of crag mask’s bend:
“old news”: this song has what will likely remain one of my favorite moments of music in 2019. the song starts off heavy enough with a guitar line that twists itself in knots, but there’s something in the air that you can feel — a tension that lets you know that a breaking point is approach. that breaking point, occurring at the 1:12 mark of the song, is as if the floor raises itself a good three feet. the ground doesn’t fall out — it rises to meet you. it’s an awesome part because it’s not like the preceding minute of music was quiet; it’s just an excellent showcase of phil lord’s engineering/mixing. when i first heard the album, “old news” was so satisfying, i listened to it about 10 times before moving on to the next track, “secret plane”.
“secret plane”: the second track, and second single of bend, probably captures the sound of crag mask better than any other track on the album. it’s crag-prime. pure, uncut, black tar crag mask. starts with a heavy guitar riff, uses lyrics that can easily be taken metaphorically or at face value, has about 8 different parts (verse, post-verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus, middle-eight, etc), and kicks in a great melody just for fun. it’s like the supremely-underrated ’90s band Failure, with a little more going on (and many fewer ’50s sci-fi references). the best part of the song? the first chorus, as abramo’s voice glides over the arrangement like butter. and while the band claim to not care much for slint (a sad truth), some comparisons with the trippy guitar lines make such comparisons hard not to make. hey, that’s more slint for me i guess.
“digging a hole”: so i wanted to originally point out a spot on “flower guts” where, early on, the music downshifts into some palm-muted verses, but i wanted to show some love to bend‘s latter half. “digging a hole” is the last conventional track on bend (the next track, “i have not dug the hole deep enough” is a mix of ambient sounds and field recordings), and it certainly feels like the last track in its urgency. the band rarely stick on one phrase too long before running through to the next one, like they’ve got all of these other ideas that they want to expend before time has run out. my favorite pieces of the song, though, belong to zayne couch’s synthesizers. at the 1:22 mark, one of those synths gets bumped up in the mix for a few seconds, and it reminds you how unpredictable the band can be.
check out bend on bandcamp below.
