Adrian Crowley - A Northern State
(Ba Da Bing!)
However you label it you can't deny that there's little room left for exploration in the world of slow, melodic, and melancholy rock music. It seems as though there's an almost one-to-one ratio of citizens to indie-folk bands in the U.S., so it is indeed a rare occurrence when someone comes along and does something new and exciting with an increasingly tired and clichéd genre. With juggernaut albums from Mark Kozelek, Low, Codeine, and Will Oldham (not to mention those musicians' influences) existing for over a decade they, and others, stack the odds of finding a good song well in favor of the past. This does not bode well for Adrian Crowley, an Irishman unafraid of the song title "Happiness Came to My Door."
While A Northern State is well produced and full of warm and lush arrangements, the end result leaves much to desire. The album starts strong with "One Hundred Words for Snow," not yet damning the album to the fate it prescribes itself on later tracks. However, tedium sets in quickly. "Photographing Lightning Strikes" may as well be Hayden's "Dynamite Walls," another relatively commonplace ode to nature and sentimentalism. The only real difference is that Hayden had the good sense to end his plodding song before the seven-minute mark and spared us such hackneyed lyrics as "Playing tapes from the radio/songs with the endings cut out/all of them with a common theme/of fires that can't be put out." Likewise, the other songs of A Northern State melt and fade into one another with few distinguishing features and an awful lot of typically reserved and flat melodies and clichéd cello playing.
Depending on your point of view and how interested you are in detail, Adrian Crowley is either marginally unique from any artist in his field or he sounds like every slowcore musician you've ever heard. Neither choice is especially promising as it's not advantageous to be derivative or forgettable—sadly, Crowley is a little bit of both. While the opening couple of tracks offer a glimmer of hope, A Northern State quickly settles and only gets slower, the songs having a near-static pace by the middle of the album until it reaches its tiresome and inevitable conclusion with "Birthday," a nine-minute drone full of tones lifted from every ambient record ever made as well as some pointless echo-y French talking added "for effect," whatever that effect may be. If the intent is to lull the listener to sleep then he's succeeded brilliantly.
Crowley's "Cassiopeia," with more lyrics about driving, singing, and closing your eyes only leaves me longing for Joanna Newsom's song of the same name as well as any number of other much more imaginative and affecting singer/songwriters fearlessly charting new sounds and ideas. Crowley's not such a bad guy; he just blends in with the crowd a little too easily to leave any kind of lasting impression.
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