Crack Cloud - Red Mile (2024) [Hi-Res]

According to the band bio for Crack Cloud's third album, Red Mile is a study of "the experience of aging out of chaos, adjusting to strange new hopes and making peace with the group's own mythology." The Vancouver multimedia collective—currently 10 members, with dozens more who have come and gone—was largely formed through connections made in addiction recovery and mental health programs; these are people who know therapy speak. But there is nothing pat or trite about the songs, which sound defiant and full of complementary contradictions. The angular and leaning hard into early '80s New Wave track "Blue Kite" was written with a cultural intersection in mind, leader Zach Choy has said: growing up in the early aughts, when punk music often meant being a "jackass" to cover up for self doubt; and the theme of the 1993 Chinese film Blue Kite, about a boy who retreats from the shackles of social restrictions by flying his kite (only to later give in to conformity). "I'm back to writing but I feel a little static/ I've gotten older so I don't feel as emphatic/ You know my story yeah I'm just a fucking addict/ The market's run its course now back into the attic," Choy sings, adopting a retro bratty tone as nervy strings saw away. It's an affectation he also pulls out for the Imperial Teen-esque "Epitaph," singing like a yob struck in the heart by tender emotion. Dark, shadowy bass thrums beneath a purposely off-kilter, lipstick smear of a guitar melody on "Lack of Lack"; a slow, low blare of sax warms up, then the music drops out. When the woodwind returns, sharp and wailing, the drums kick in like back-up muscle. "I Am (I Was)" binds together gang vocals, crisp acoustic guitar and a wash of spacey synth—a pleasing juxtaposition that creates a surprising lushness. "Ballad of Billy" is a cinematic wonder. Led by horn, it sashays and swings and staggers with a nostalgic melodrama that evokes Jonathan Fire*Eater, Johnny Thunders and '50s greaser rock 'n' roll. "Inside of Billy's chest/ Is a stolen heart of gold/ And it's painfully pounding/ Against his ribs hot and cold/ Promises, promises/ All the lies he told," go the sweetly feminine vocals, following up the slurring, almost chanty-like male part. There's a clear throughline to the Clash on "The Medium," a song about how much joy punk rock brings to fans—which, inevitably, leads someone to try and cash in on the pure scene: "The medium itself was the message on the block/ Slender figures with the most radical quivers/ A penchant for dissonance that make the normies shiver/ Who would've thought that the socially reclusive/ Could be exploited for industry usage?" At over eight minutes, "Lost on the Red Mile" unravels from dreaminess into a loose, noodling, needling jam that sounds vulnerably human: the keyboards like breathing lungs, the percussion like pumping blood. Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:
1.01 - Crack Cloud - Crack Of Life (5:51)
1.02 - Crack Cloud - The Medium (4:37)
1.03 - Crack Cloud - Blue Kite (6:11)
1.04 - Crack Cloud - Lack Of Lack (4:44)
1.05 - Crack Cloud - Epitaph (4:30)
1.06 - Crack Cloud - I Am (I Was) (5:34)
1.07 - Crack Cloud - Ballad Of Billy (5:26)
1.08 - Crack Cloud - Lost On The Red Mile (8:16)