Crescent - Drifting Souls

Without much fanfare or particular anticipation, on August 8th Fat Cat released Little Waves, the new album by Crescent, a cornerstone band of that alternative Bristol scene which, from the mid-Nineties onward, leapt into the spotlight as the crucible of one of the most exciting music scenes of the era.

Quietly, we were saying, much like Matt Jones' entire career, which has never received the kind of critical acclaim that would unanimously recognize its worth, or at least acknowledge his visionary talent.

And yet it's precisely Little Waves — perhaps the least daring Crescent record, though well above average, good even, we'd say — that captures a sound so personal it stands as one of the few brilliantly focused perspectives on the evolution of modernity. Anyone following the band's growth will certainly be aware of the restless searching of this Bristol multi-instrumentalist. Of an ongoing experiment aimed at codifying a language capable of synthesizing the legacy of "old rock" with the new demands of the various "post" musics.

Crescent have often groped in the dark, yet it seems to us they've never lacked the courage to take risks, to measure themselves against the most disparate sonic sources. An important factor, considering the forced implosion of much of today's music, trapped in an eternal transition from some "post-something" toward a "who-knows-what", which basically amounts to revivalism. It's precisely in this sense that the band's detractors should reassess what they have to offer.

We mentioned alternative (to trip-hop) Bristol, that cluster of bands that managed (not all of them, admittedly) to position themselves as a meeting point between different genres: ambient music, isolationism in the vein of Talk Talk/Main/Seefeel, an almost always mid-tempo electronic music, the shoegaze of Spacemen 3 and especially Loop, and kraut-rock. In a context that saw the rise of artists of the caliber of Flying Saucer Attack, Third Eye Foundation, Amp, Movietone — including, by stylistic affinity, Hood too, even though they're from Leeds — Crescent, at least on their best albums, proved to be among the most balanced in carrying out this syncretism.

Crescent took their first steps starting in the mid-Nineties, in 1994 to be precise, when Planet Punk released the singles "Lost" and "Sun". The backbone of the band is made up of the Jones brothers: Matt (the mastermind of the project), already a member of Amp and Movietone, and Sam (guitars), who had collaborated with Flying Saucer Attack.

The band's first release of any real substance is the Crescent EP, otherwise known as "The Sun EP", from 1996, worth tracking down especially for the epic-length "Unit System": almost 14 paranoid minutes alternating distant drum syncopations, luminescent visions, and nightmarish atmospheres.

Shortly after, just a few months later, came Now, the debut LP, again on Planet Punk, still to this day one of Jones and co.'s best works, marking a considerable leap in quality compared to expectations that had pegged them as mere recyclers of Spiritualized and assorted shoegazers. Listless, minimal, melancholic, with a strongly lo-fi appeal, Crescent offer up a good compromise of melodies — often aborted ones — a flawed song form, raw noise excursions followed by psychedelic collapses and hypnotic trance passages à la Sonic Youth. The distortions sound stylized, or rather pressurized, as if trying to take flight inside a metal can. Quite often, the melange takes on the look of a noise collage recorded in "one take". At times it feels like being projected into a parallel dimension where Swell Maps meet Spacemen 3.

Run through with a subcutaneous tension that rarely finds release, Now comes close to what the rest of the Bristol scene was experimenting with at the time, but sets itself apart in terms of intensity. As things stand, Crescent are essentially a rock band — as acid as you like, but also capable of putting the pedal down, and equally skilled at crafting quieter moments where all of Jones' skill at the game of quotation comes to the fore. And it's precisely in the intrinsic structure of the songs that Crescent's winning card lies. If "Sun", carried over from the debut EP, sounds like a Spiritualized outtake, then "Supercostellation" could be pointed to as the blueprint for the Crescent sound to come, with that limping gait well supported by Jones' darkly subsonic vocals. Once again a protagonist, the talented Bristol multi-instrumentalist appears on the gorgeous "Song", howling furiously over a chaotic carpet of distortion. But the record as a whole comes across as unmistakably personal in its disturbed, at times sickly nature, made even more nervy by a production that's anything but accommodating.

Three years later, Electronic Sound Constructions sees Jones go it entirely alone, and that leap into the void would, in hindsight, prove to be an important transitional step on the way to the definitive Crescent sound. The record meanders at times, seeking, at best, footholds in a hardcore isolationism that conjures the ghosts of Dome and Experimental Audio Research. At worst, a kind of amateurism emerges, recalling the homemade electronic productions that were in vogue at the time, and even more so today. The use of tape loops and scraps of post-industrial noise lend the whole thing a patina of irreversible autism, in constructions that seem to conceal more than they reveal, playing at hiding among the shadows, the folds of sound and the sudden pauses. As if the record had been conceived to be listened to in zero gravity, in those situations where every sensory experience is the product of inertia. Almost as if perception were induced through a forced osmosis with the object of listening.

The cinematic flow that marks "Quince Flowers" and, not least, "Abstract Forms", on the other hand, delineates those moments of greater compositional clarity, where a sketch of song form takes precedence over the shapeless mass of pseudo-avant-garde scraps. Rather out of place is the remarkable "Philicorda Loops (Excerpt)" — without a doubt the best track on the record, as well as one of the absolute peaks of Jones' experimentation — which unspools over more than fifteen minutes of celestial loops, close to the now-celebrated Basinski-esque language, amid out-of-phase sounds and near-systematic implosions.

We spoke of the importance of Electronic Sound Constructions in the evolution of Crescent's vocabulary. Here Jones tries to engage with electronics in a decisive way, taking on minimal sounds verging on silence. And this almost paroxysmal incommunicability would go on to define By The Roads And The Fields, albeit conveyed through a rather different grammar.

First, though, came the release on Roomtone of Collected Songs, a collection of pieces written over the three years from '95 to '98, definitely preferable to Electronic Sound Constructions in terms of listenability, despite a lack of internal coherence due to its "cold assembly". Not leftovers, though — or at least the overall quality wouldn't suggest as much.

Once again the album testifies to a sound that is completely folded in on itself, at times even claustrophobic, as in the excellent "Sleep Well", or in "Unity", where a mournful piano refrain underpins Jones' monotone, desolate lament.

The heterogeneity ultimately proves to be the winning card of the operation, where you can trace the "old" Crescent (the ones from the debut) in "Every Atom Of Your Blood", or try to go further, into the Bowery Electric-style trip-hop of "Star". The common thread providing a modicum of unity is a certain retro/psychedelic taste, traceable in the Doors-like organs of "Shadow" and Light/Eyes.

As for the rest, "Collected Songs" offers a fairly broad overview both of Jones's sources of inspiration and of the processes through which they are transformed and then recontextualized, with an eye toward music poised midway between pop and para-avant-garde leanings.

The masterpiece seems within reach, dated 2003. It's called By The Roads And The Fields, and it is, without mincing words, one of the cornerstone albums of this early millennium, from whatever angle you choose to look at it. Indeed, viewed in retrospect its scope is even clearer, especially given the current lull the music scene is going through. As we said at the outset, it's truly one of the few (last?) albums to walk hand in hand with modernity, to expose its viruses and idiosyncrasies, to render vivid the sense of alienation and unease - the neuroses tied to shifting urban landscapes, to the loneliness that reigns in metropolitan areas. And Matt Jones painfully narrates its lacerations, curled up even further in a fetal position, as if defending himself by simulating a kind of maternal protection, trying to reclaim a moral innocence irremediably corrupted by compromised dealings with the society of the spectacle. A song of pain and resignation that comes from within, bringing to mind a session of self-analysis in which the subconscious forcefully pushes to scream out the violence it has suffered. An alien record, even today, despite four years having passed since its release.

Crescent transform into a kind of chamber jazz orchestra, where the various components find perfect synergy in an "autistic" interplay with Matt Jones's voice, following its deliberately monotonous course, and reacting with funeral marches that foreshadow a fall into an abyss of scalding tar. The opening "Spring" displays a rounded, pop shape, even as it serves as a vehicle for prostration. Perhaps to entice the listener in, to allow them to cross the ford and enter the chasm. Because the tracks that follow suck you in like a bilge pump, wrap around you morbidly, and cling to the soul like flypaper. Because that acoustic pacing resounds in the brain louder than a thousand screeching guitars playing at once, and paints sinister dub atmospheres, even though, technically, there's no dub to speak of. Thus "New Leaves" carries on the funeral, with echoes of tribalism in the distance, while "Straight Line" tolls like a death bell, with frenzied strings in the background that seem to be aiming for free jazz but instead let out shrill, grating scrapes, unsettling in their indefinable precariousness. More transience in "Mimosa", where found sounds, guitars, horns, organs and homemade(?) instruments march to the rhythm of drifting ghost ships.

In the end you'd expect, if not catharsis, then at least a breath of light, a faint glimmer in the distance, but nothing. "Structure And Form" draws the veil over the corpse of modernity, making way for a new season in which music recycles itself with too much awareness of the past and too little connection to the humus of the present.

If Joy Division had been born in Bristol in 2003, they probably would have sounded like this. Because By The Roads And The Fields is one of those records capable - along with "A Promise" by Xiu Xiu, "Drinking Songs" by "cousin" Matt Elliott, and a few others - of closing the circle where the post-industrial anxiety of "Unknown Pleasures" had opened it, running parallel to the wave of new wave revivalism that would instead trivialize its language.

It can't have been easy for Matt Jones to get back to thinking about music after a masterpiece of the stature of By The Roads And The Fields. The years that had passed and the artistic silence in which he'd holed up gave no hint of surprises to come. But clearly we were wrong. And so, suddenly, on a warm August day, Crescent return with a new record, and you're almost afraid to approach it for fear the magic might vanish.

Fortunately, Little Waves proves to be a record worth paying attention to, so don't pay too much mind to the final score (relatively low), given by a reviewer still dazzled by the thrilling desolation of By The Roads And The Fields, unable to form a judgment entirely free of bias... Then again, could we really have expected yet another miracle? Could we have demanded a repeat of the complexity, and above all the alien allure, of that wonder in sound? Certainly not.

And indeed Little Waves treads different paths, sounding like a good record of melancholy folk in slow motion, with sturdy songwriting and a more settled mood, just barely lit by rays of light that manage (with effort) to pierce through the heart of darkness. Either way, you'll find an in-depth discussion in the reviews section. Suffice it to say here that Crescent's music continues to move us. That's no small thing these days.

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