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1997, iMusic
Way back in the late eighties brother/sister partnership Alison and Jim Shaw formed the nucleus of Cranes. Their swans/nick cave-inspired musical arrangements coupled with Alison's ethereal vocals, won them near instant press acclaim. When they first emerged from their tiny Portsmouth basement with their debut album 'Self Non Self', however they were pitted against the whole 'madchester' scene (stone roses, happy mondays et al) whilst eleswhere the likes of the Wonder Stuff and Carter USM were kicking up an oily racket that was barnstorming the charts bigtime.
Who would have thought that while all those bands have fallen by the wayside, the dark delicate bloom of Cranes has not just survived all the changing winds of britpop but positively thrived? From their formidible, bleak and avant garde origins they've gone on to hone their sound down to a deceptive pop simplicity that's at once subtle and accessible, enjoy the patronage of the Cure's Robert Smith, assailed the top 30, and achieved enormous Europe wide success (not so long ago in Prague there were near-riots when tickets for a Cranes gig sold out).
Small wonder that after undertaking three projects back-to-back - their third album 'Loved', the limited edition 'The Tragedy of Orestes and Electre', a mock filmscore based on Jean-Paul Sartre's play 'The Flies' and the soundtrack for Tania Diez's Oscar winning film 'Scarborough Ahoy' - that the band took a six month break. During this time Alison travelled to the Americas, guitarist Matt Cope left the band to emigrate to New Zealand, and Jim switched from drums to guitars. Having re-evaluated and re-charged, they've come back 'Population Four', their most accomplished offering to date.
Recorded in a converted barn in Sussex, 'Population Four' was produced by Mark Freegard (who's also worked with Manic Street Preachers and Lush), the first time the band have entrusted studio responsibilties to an outsider. Wanting to preserve a 'live' feel to their sound, the album was recorded in a double quick four weeks with a minimum of overdubs and programming. The effect is that 'Population Four' is Cranes at their most starkly natural.
According to Alison, all the songs were motivated by 'a recent period of great happiness before tumbling into equally great despair then back again'. Furthermore, her months of travelling have added new colour to the icy palour of Cranes cheeks. One of the secrets of the band's success has been the ability to absorb their personal experiences into their material, thereby keeping it from stagnating into cliche or passeism.
'Population Four' glides effortlessly from light to shade, ebullient to introspective, sombre to demonstrative, from pop to anti-pop without ever seeming laboured or emotionally contrived. Opener 'Tangled Up' is Cranes at their most stately and simple, yet emotionally caught up in a delicate web of tensions. That's followed by the unexpexted fuzzy grunge growl of 'Fourteen', before 'Breeze' and 'Can't Get Free', reminiscent of a darker, more skeletal belly and apparently inspired by Alison's experimenting in something other than food while out in Mexico. To those who imagine from all this that Cranes have 'gone American', fear not - 'Sweet Unknown' is classic Cranes, spare and remotely melancholic, while 'Angle Bell's' perturbing, scraping bow chimes a note of agitation that is all Cranes' own. 'To be, working to a furious cat's cradle of guitar frenzy, provides a sweeping, majestic conclusion to the album.
How do Cranes do it? 1. They're Europhiles. In today's britrock climate where the global imagination barely stretches beyond Camden, and with American rock seemingly down and out, Cranes are one of the few groups willing to diversify and take cues for their imagery and sound from European culture. Says Alison 'We've always had a european outlook, we've never thought of ourselves as just a 'British' band. I speak French and Spanish and as a band we feel just at home in Scandanavia or Italy as in Portsmouth'.
How do Cranes do it? 2. The brother sister nucleus. The tie that binds and a rare one in modern music (the only other example that springs to mind is, eerily, the Carpenters). 'It can be easier to get over arguments. And we still continue to surprise one another, which is what keeps us going. I wouldn't say we have any sort of psychic bond but we do have a strange way of managing to think along the same lines'.
Songs of experience - the further down the line they go, the stronger they seem.
© iMusic 1997
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