Crack Cloud: Red Mile review – aggressively tuneful rock about life’s big questions
Trite metaphors, tortured similes and outright cliches are, ahem, ten a penny in today’s pop lyrics – so how refreshing to have Zach Choy, bandleader with Canadian indie curveballs Crack Cloud, writing with such wit, bite and the kind of perfectly scanning rhyme you get in the best sea shanties or children’s literature. That isn’t faint praise: it’s deceptively hard to write lyrics this rhythmic, this rounded, much less so while making trenchant comments about the very capabilities of art.
Crack Cloud have had a shifting lineup over the past decade and two previous albums, and the band match Choy’s ambition, playing a singular kind of maximalist garage rock decked out with synths, saxophones, strings and singalongs. Yet he remains at its centre, a drummer-singer with a history of addiction. “Road to recovery, an early talking point,” he notes drily of the press (including the Guardian) who latched on to this traumatic story when the band broke through around 2017, and Choy is so aware of how personal narrative and pop culture are constructed.
Almost aggressively tuneful, The Medium pits the enjoyable but shallow world of pop and rock (“It’s a song about Billy, yeah he’s gone downtown / But to his surprise Sally’s not around” is his withering summation of the genres’ lyricism) against punk, which ends up being just as commercialised: “Who would’ve thought that the socially reclusive / Could be exploited for industry usage?” Crack of Life is a sarky knees-up about humankind’s arrogance, to a lo-fi reggaeton shuffle: “Come all ye, join us / Let’s all have some fun / From microbe to the Matrix / We’ll outlive our sun!” But despite being jaded, Choy can’t help but try to say something with his music: “Overdose on thinking, yeah a casualty of art / Fountain of Bellagio beating in my heart,” he sings on Epitaph. It all makes for a wonderfully grand album about the big stuff in life: art, family, and whatever else we should do on this planet.
