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1st December 1990, Melody Maker
CRANES
NORWICH ARTS CENTRE
I GET the feeling tonight that Cranes aren't exactly on the same wavelength as the rest of the world. They sound off-kilter, like an echo from another world. When Alison Shaw sings, sounds as if she's on a non-existent frequency, a petrified spectral shiver wandering among her own private shadows. While most everybody else is stepping out on to the streets, making things obvious, Cranes take you underground, to the endless labyrinths of their own secluded lair.
Norwich Arts Centre is a perfectly suitable setting. It has a strangely oppressive sense of space, it's minimally elaborate, and it's a converted church. I know they loathe being called goths, but like the architecture of that period they aspire, pointing you towards something inexplicable yet inspirational, as if they've been struck by a premonition of greatness they can't articulate. But Cranes don't tell you that everything will turn out all right in the end. They sound haunted by their vision, terrified by what will happen should they reach their journey's end.
Images of obscure clockwork machinery are projected on to the drapery hung over the back of the stage, eloquently complementing the kinetic propulsion of the music. It sounds desolate, like it's been functioning of its own accord, and without witness, for an indeterminate length of time. Listening to this unanswerable ritual, you can feel the motion but only your imagination can tell you what that function is, or where it's leading to. On "Fuse", for example, the guitars and taped orchestration climb forever upwards, like a pilgrimage on Escher's staircase that increases in magnitude with every step, always arriving back where it started but with a great intensity.
Alison looks uncomfortable as ever, as if we're intruding on her own intimate ceremony, raising a hand to her forehead and then finding herself distracted, trying to pretend we're just a figment of her imagination that she can banish with the requisite amount of willpower. If Cranes sometimes make you feel like an outsider trespassing on sacred ground, rather than shutting you out and putting you into the position of mere voyeur, they draw you in, put you under the spell of this intangible power. At times I'm reminded of the austere passageways in "Hellraiser", echoing with the remorseful cries or sequestered incumbents like so many never-ending stories.
Their first song tonight sounds like a hallowed waltz from another dimension, while "Give" is all friction-(slow)burn and stressed vapour. But "Starblood" takes me so far out on a limb I swear my mind's got stretch marks. It starts with a palpitating heartbeat, punching so hard it feels like it's going to break out of your chest, before Alison's voice rises out of nowhere and into slow-motion orbit, like a translucent satellite picking up power and substance from the sun until it reaches the critical mass to propel it into the void. I find myself trying to keep it all in, trying to keep myself intact, but it feels like I'm on the verge of exploding. I daren't imagine anything beyond this.
"Starblood". No other word describes Cranes better than that; a sense of one's intrinsic power that you daren't let loose, because in order to touch it you'd have to rupture yourself, break the skin that delineates your individuality, your sense of self. Cranes are trapped within themselves, captivated by an energy they can never fully experience.
Cranes may be "Inescapable", but somehow Alison Shaw's wonderlust/wander-lost plea creates infinite space within a finite form. Like a velvet glove cast in iron. Like nothing on the surface of this earth.
Reviewed by Jonathan Selzer
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