Crows

Crows’ vox-agit-popper James Cox has declared third album ‘Reason Enough’ to embody and exude the four-piece’s essence as “doing the same thing, but a lot better. This is Crows in high-definition”.

Whether a result of a change of space – recording in Gloucestershire instead of London – or having Mercury Prize-winning producer Andy Savours, who’s previously collaborated with the likes of Black Country, New Road and My Bloody Valentine on-board, it’s hard to disagree with the proclamation.

Slow burners, (releasing first single in 2011) 2019’s debut album ‘Silver Tongues’ riff-raffishly announced the group (Cox, Steve Goddard on guitar, Jith Amarasinghe on bass and drummer Sam Lister) as a clangourous post-punk proposition full of submerged signals and in-yer-face polemics.

2022 follow-up ‘Beware Believers’ arrived as a subtle continuation of vectored-hectoring and jaggressive edges. Number three displays a different, diffident sheen with an even more forensic treatise on ‘modern’ living. Cox’s transmissions are weighted with more glower-power and self-confessional solace, hitting you where it ‘really’ hurts. Less in yer face, more in yer heart and gut.

The standout is ‘Bored’, 139 seconds of enduring existential ennui, everyday emptiness compounded by technonanism, telecom-modification and vacuous escapism. Cox’s laconic drawl is augmented by an early Pixies-sounding freneticism. To be filed alongside Buzzcocks’s ‘Boredom’ and Iggy Pop’s ‘I’m bored’ in the ‘capturing the shitegeist’ stakes.

‘Is it better?’ is a pleading call and response to the Universe’s capacity to proffer solutions. ‘Visions of me’ continues with philosophical conundrums and quandaries (“I need a break from ‘this’ reality”) are quizzically cast outwards with the necessary answers magically appearing within. Salvation is out there, if you just ask.

The permanently depressing spectacle of political malfeasance, corruption, power and lies informs the obituary for England in the PiL-lioring ‘Land of the rose’. A symbolic slandering of entrenched entitlement that the electorate was expected to swallow would be a thing of the past with a change of guard and scenery. There’s no future in England’s dreaming, indeed.

Another key point with Crows’ current feat *ahem* is the evolution and development in the artwork. Airy-variations on a dream, psychedelic progressions and visually monochromatic Masonica and esoterica all to be decoded: All-seeing eyes of Horus emitting and emoting droplets of an unknown property, spiral staircases, chequered floors and candelabra, snakes and ladders, padlock and key, a rose, some dice, Christ and crescent moons.

Deep inspection is a necessity with these texts. Reason enough is reason to believe.