Crawl will again entertain you with loads of thick, corrosive sludge but this time dripping with even more blazing hot groove making you immediately grab an ice-cold beer can first for refreshing your brow and neck and then for joining the party …. So, yes, Crawl built their debut full-length album on a most classic backbone of genuine, filthy, swampy sludge metal badassery. However the band did not slavishly stick to that reference genre but created an original work of great impact by means of some contamination and even experimentation without, however, straying too much from their true love in music.
What this true love is for Crawl is immediately clear as from the shortish instrumental intro Crack Tea, a straightforward, catchy fuzz-laden welcome to the concise but finger-licking juicy Don’t Kid Me. This track is a glorious ode to the most infectious and sweaty southern sludge metal straight from the lagoon in the name of Buzzov*en, Weedeater, Iron Monkey, Eyehategod, Crowbar, Wo-Fat, etc. Here as well in the rest of the album saturated buzzy sounds, coarsely distorted mammoth riffs, pounding rhythms and laid-back yet ferociously sick vocals, all remind of the “southern-fried doom”, of sludge metal seasoned in oak barrels, of the rebellious old-school hardcore spirit which make the musical background of all band members. This is especially true for generously bearded guitarist/vocalist Eric Crowe, whose CV lists bands like Hog Mountin, Molehill, Social Infestation, just to mention some ….
Probably the dilated, almost 12 minutes-long, instrumental piece Pildust is the way for reminding the affection of the band also to drony sounds (like in Fulci, another distinguished affiliation on Eric Crowe’s resumé). Pildust is driven by a slowly evolving desert rock melody developing in a cyclic way for several minutes and thus turning into a pleasantly hypnotic refrain. A sense of void and immensity is evoked as soon as the sounds basically die away into silence and then progressively, and hypnotically, grow back in intensity as a dull, monotonic, if not funereal, thumping sound. How refreshing is, therefore, the rapid escape into the tight riffing of a steaming hot bluesy groove about halfway through the piece! And that brief but memorable, deep guitar howl like in sabbathian Sabbra Cadabra! Then, like a dense slimy brine the funereal psychedelic rhythm will swallow the groove till the end. But maximum groove and sickness are going to reign back again thanks to a killer cover of Buzzov*en’s track Useless. There Eric’s vocals will vomit nihilism and devastation and will rip your gutter while guitars and drums grow to explode in majestic ultra-dense flow of roars and feedback.
Nigredo is another piece exceeding 12 minutes length where the Crawl guys will blend different moods radically. The very first notes of Nigredo are pure vitamines for fuzz-lovers. The trio like to enrich their sludgey sound with a high-tension, dynamic, when not convoluted lead. In Nigredo the extremely coarse sound of the mid-tempo churning riffs and Eric Crowe’s raucous barking are remarkably contrasting with the rather clean, booming sound of Tommy Butler’s agile drumming. The leading melody is quite simple and aggressive, and duly sinister in its mild dissonance. The sticky, toxic viscosity of this relentless music is claustrophobic and quickly burning out your oxygen, and Crowe’s guttural roars become like your suffocated seek for air. So the evolution of the rhythm in the second half of this long track comes almost as a surprise, and a mouthful of fresh air. Almost … The sudden interruption of the galloping rhythm is like a precipitous pressure drop into a dark, numb emptiness where slow vibrations of the chords and Eric’s clean vocals (oh, how cool!) combine into a mournful, minimalistic chant of meditative charm in the vein of the latest Om. Sequences of delicate, almost acoustic touches over the fret board are actually the trick for revitalizing the initial beat and gradually bringing back the tight and coarsely fuzzy riffing, this time contaminated by spacey psychedelic effects.
The album is closed by the gloomy track 3 AM and a Loaded Gun, rather short (less than 6 minutes) but a hymn to total desperation of rare intensity. This track is probably the most grievous one of the whole album, and drenched with great, distilled destructo-sludge introduced by bleak mixture of drony, industrial-like noise with warped vocal samples. Eric’s voice too is deformed into tortured gurgles and moans that seem to emerge with extreme effort from the leading, mammoth-paced death march, the last, slow, dull, implacable beat you’ll hear …
Crawl’s album Old Wood & Broken Dreams is available via Bandcamp, together with the rest of the band’s production, in multiple high-quality formats and on i-Tunes. There is cool merch also available via the
Stone Groove Records store.
However I hope some solidly material version, i.e., in good ol’ thick, pitch black, heavyweight vinyl, of this first powerful full-length album will hopefully be available soon as well.
Words: Marilena Moroni
Track-list:
1. Crack Tea (01:36)
2. Don't Kid Me (04:44)
3. Pildust (11:33)
4. Useless [Buzzov*en cover] (04:45)
5. Nigredo (12:35)
6. 3 AM and a Loaded Gun (05:57)
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