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3rd March 2002, Washington Post
Cranes would like you to know that they derive their name not from the leggy water birds but from the towering machines that loom over cityscapes in transition. This was easy enough to surmise from their 1991 debut album, "Wings of Joy," which despite its title was a dark-hued cacophony of industrial atmospherics that featured Alison Shaw's feather-light vocals wafting above the clanging fray in ironic counterpoint. They were a bracing corrective to the post-Goth era, which by then had devolved into the black-fingernail-polish pop sound of veteran bands like the Cure, and a melodic step forward for the cultish anti-pop distortions of industrial rock.
But the best thing about the English group's sound was always the music, with its edge of silent-movie melodrama and finely coordinated bashing and clattering -- it distracted from and provided a contrast for Shaw's self-conscious baby-voiced singing.
After two largely irrelevant '90s follow-ups, Cranes regrouped with a new rhythm section and this year released the ambitiously titled "Future Songs." Still led by Alison Shaw and her brother Jim, the revamped band discarded its industrial base for a floaty trance sound that lets Alison shine. It's all of a piece -- drifting melodies, high-pitched somnambulant vocals, vague lyrics. And herein lies the problem.
The best thing about Cranes is still the music; unfortunately, it's so subdued that Shaw's doomed-princess babbling takes center stage. The lyrics -- all songs are by the Shaw siblings -- are obscure and free-associative, a subterranean mishmash of fleeting thoughts: A line in "Future Songs," "Because your dream . . . needs help to flow," could be plopped down in "Flute Songs" between "Therefore . . . you are . . . all I wanted" and "But so cold," to take only two tracks as examples. (They're very fond of ellipses . . .)
There's a lot of talk about dreaming and sleeping and waiting and being lost and things changing. There's also a song called "Fragile," which will come as no surprise and should by all rights accompany any news footage of French pairs skating judge Marie Reine le Gougne.
The Shaws can put together a tune, but they're undone by pretentiousness every time. An insistent guitar strum and moody shimmering synth anchor the beautiful melody of "Sunrise," but near the end, the arrangement double-tracks the vocals so that two Shaws gurgle coyly over the music. "Driving in the Sun" comes to a gentle close, as if the whole band has fallen headfirst onto a big down comforter, but a sample of tweeting birds adds unnecessary atmospherics. And "The Maker of Heavenly Trousers" is solidly structured and tuneful, but Shaw's affected singing still sounds, in the words of a friend, like the Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser "with a clothespin on her nose." The songs resemble lullabies in their simplicity and capacity to induce a great weariness; slow guitar-plucks drive cozily repetitive tracks like "Even When."
Sweet relief comes on Track 8, titled "Eight." A return to early Cranes, it sounds like a hundred garbage cans being rolled down a flight of stairs. Like "Eight," "Everything For" is instrumental; it's a successful experiment in warm pop constructed out of cold technology. But those are slim pickings on an album of 11 songs, two remixes and a bonus track. And in an era in which women in rock are a given, there's something unsavory about a grown woman choosing to coo and prattle like a toddler.
Reviewed by Arion Berger
© Washington Post 2002
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