Adrian Crowley - When You Are Here You Are Family
(Ba Da Bing!)
What I like about Adrian Crowley's When You Are Here You Are Family is that its songs fit together well, like a series. Each song is sort of like a different version of each other song on the album. They are all woven from the same material. Perhaps the album itself is a giant circular hoop, woven from the dried reeds of the estuary, made moist and a little pliable by the blown brackish mist. Maybe a kingfisher lives in this reed hoop. I like this nice woven, circular feel. Steve Albini's classically cold production is cold and sparse and apt. (The way he has recorded the drums is really fakejazz actually: those loose, resonant toms and bass drum sound great.) .
The album's dominant emotion—its sole emotion—is a sad, heavy yearning. It kind of reminds me of the time when I was five years old and the phone rang and it was my grandmother telling my mother that her father was dead, and my mom and dad did a slow, silent waltz, tears streaming down her cheeks, on the woven red rug in the living room. (Neither of my parents say this happened, but I remember it). But Crowley's album is neither as intense nor as timely as that memory; I think his music only reminded me of my parents' waltz because they share the same awkward, lumbering rhythm.
Crowley's vibe is almost that of a de-politicized Radiohead—if we are to recognize Radiohead's existential nausea as vaguely and unfortunately politicized—adapted to a singer-songwriter idiom. The result is an austere sadness that seems at once purer and less affecting, impotent. Without balls, the album amounts to so much more-or-less decorous whining: watery and domestic. It relies too heavily on tastefully brushed cymbal crescendos, the cello's wintry legato, and the minor-ninth chord.
Every song sounds like it wants to soar-on-its-own-broken-wings a la "Creep" and so much great mid-period Radiohead, but evidently Mr. Crowley is neither singer nor songwriter enough to trust himself even to try and take us there. As a result, every song is exhaustingly even. We often witness the conventional dynamic shifts between verse, bridge, and chorus, but rarely is there an overall guiding direction or a climax.
But perhaps all I am picking up on here is the essentially singer-songwriter approach. Frequently overwrought lyrics and redundant melodies suggest Mr. Crowley's priorities. Alas, pop music is rarely made vivid with self-consciously articulate lyrics: that is why the singer-songwriter tradition is a terrible one, be its ranks copping Bob Dylan or Thom Yorke. Crowley loses me when he sings such lyrics as, "when the birds of truth take to flying / I will wait for them," (in "Tall Ships") and "Don't throw your eyes at the heavens / I know now what the storm can bring / for it is strong" (in "North Shore Song").
I also dislike Thomas Haugh's drumming. You'd think that his sometimes syncopated beats might lend a vitality to Crowley's wallowing introversion, but it just makes the songs even more offensively indistinct: while the songs apparently don't intend to rock, the solid drumming tramples what delicacy or subtlety they might have possessed.
What seems promising about Crowley is the sensitivity of his vision. It is clear from the songs on When You Are Here You Are Family that he is interested in presenting a world that is personal, ambiguous, and emotional. He simply needs to broaden the range of his songwriting. Will he be sensitive to life in its dynamism and duality, or will he be merely hypersensitive: miscalibrated, compressing all the subtlety and variety of experience into a single ray of melancholic, wistful yearning?
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