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June 1993, NET Magazine Article (#2)
A crane, I remember thinking when Wings of Joy came out in '91, is a long-legged bird or a long-armed machine. In either case, attracts attention because of the curious way it moves.
"Curiously moving" was exactly what Cranes turned out to be. Wings of Joy, their first American release (on Dedicated\RCA), struck icicles down the backs of sensitive rockcritics everywhere. Listening to Alison Shaw's feathery voice drift across the bands measured instrumental sand dunes, the critics were moved to awestruck fist of solemnity. "A brilliant, intensely worrying album," said one. "Beautiful sadness, indeed," said another. "A trans-Siberian express out of Pop City," said a third. Trans-Siberian what? There seemed to be a cult in the making.
As I played the record, a picture formed in my mind of what a devoted. Cranehead would be like. The solitary, poetic type, I figured. Wears heavy dark eyeliner, goes walking in the rain a lot. They were that type of band.
"I guess each record does kind of subconsciously reflect the way you were at the time," Alison says a bit dismissively, when I ask her if she had felt as dark and chilly as Wings of Joy sounded. It's two years later, and she and her brother Jim (the bands' drummer, keyboardist, composer and producer) are in the States on business, preparing to release their second major-label effort, Forever (also on Dedicated\RCA) Both in our conversation and on the new record, the two principal members of Cranes seem out to divest me of my stereotypes.
Forever is both a departure and a continuation for Cranes. The band's lyrical style and measured tempos are essentially the same, but where Wings of Joy surrounded Alison's vocals with a quiet cacophony of lumbering keyboards and percussion, Forever is strikingly uncluttered, interspersing simple, jangling guitar lines with the heavier stuff. It retains the mesmerizing quality of Wings of Joy, while moving in a "more structured...much more outdoorsy" direction, as Jim notes.
Forever also seems pointedly less Gothic than Wings, which seemed to evoke musty cathedrals in the mind of many critics. But then, Cranes never really related to the goth label in the first place. "It doesn't seem a very good word" for the band, says Alison. "I don't think that we celebrate gloomy darkness or anything like that." She concedes that Wings... is "quite a melancholy record," but adds that "there was a thread of optimism that went through it, so that it had the feeling of going somewhere." Why is the new album titled Forever? I ask Jim. "It's optimistic...positive...antinegative!" Uh, point taken.
As both Jim and Alison glowingly explain, the source of all this optimism was Cranes' yearlong experience touring with the Cure in America and Europe. Cure frontman Robert smith, one of Cranes' biggest fans, invited the band to open for the Cure on both legs of its 1992 Wish tour. It was that year, often on the road between shows, that most of Forever was written. "It's just that [on tour], there was so much time when your mind was free to just think about things and sort of dream," recalls Alison. "And the whole experience of the tour...it just felt like things were opening up for us."
Having grown up in the '80s, I find it hard to believe that Robert Smith could be responsible for anyone's cheerful new outlook on life. Nonetheless, Alison talks of being "surrounded by friends and people that we grew to...be fond of and everything." It is this, rather than any particular musical influence, that the Cure contributed to Forever, adds Jim. A closer Cure-Cranes collaboration is forthcoming, however: Smith is currently remixing at least one track from the new album for release as a single.
The circumstances and logistics of touring were an even bigger influence on the production of the record: Forever is the first album for which Alison and Jim actually wrote the songs down before going into the studio. "Usually, when I get the idea for a melody, I sing it straight onto a recording... That's how the group started... trying to write songs by recording them." Approaching production with already-existing songs, Jim found that Forever's unusual new sonic vocabulary came naturally. "Things happen by accident, or sounds come about just out of the blue," he notes. For instance, the odd vacuum noise at the end of "Adrift" was the dying cry of a faulty delay mechanism. "I think we broke it," he admits, "but it was worth it for the sound."
Cranes' upcoming European tour with Slowdive will be a much smaller operation than their last tour, with the band returning to smaller venues, rather than the stadiums they played with the Cure. They seem almost a little disappointed, if ultimately grateful, for this change of scene. Though they don't expect to ever be as big as the Cure, the delicious dread of turning up their amps in a place like the Pittsburgh Amphitheatre is clearly still fresh in Cranes' minds. Besides the Cure, who would you most like to tour with? I ask. "I don't know," says Jim. "Frank Sinatra." Cranes opening for Frank? "Oh," he corrects me, "I meant the other way around."
Written by Andrea Moed
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