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1991, Melody Maker
THEY'RE so serious, don't you think, so po-faced, so artless, so simple and convinced. In a world of nudges, winks and double-entendres, Cranes are infuriatingly honest and unironic. If all this bloodymindedness resulted in anything approaching the mediocre, they'd be unbearable as performers, as people. As it is, they're something OTHER. You either adore Cranes or find them abhorrent. Either way, "Wings of Joy", their first album, forces you to ask yourself some pretty serious questions - questions about 1991, questions about the nature of The Song, questions about yourself.
Basically Cranes do not belong to the class of 1991. They owe nothing to My Bloody Valentine, The Byrds or the fearsome hegemony of house. Instead they follow the trajectory set by 1988's sonic architects - Front242, Skinny Puppy and, most notably, The Young Gods. They eschew the benign tyranny of the perfect pop song in favour of a more subversive and unpopular vision of noise and its power to move (noise nowadays is mostly a gimmick, simply something used to scuff up what would otherwise be a likeable though rather ordinary song). And with Cranes, it truly is a vision of noise - noise as the annihalator, noise as nausea, cruel noise, beautiful noise, silence as noise, noise as an imminent, terrible prospect.
But the odd and very great thing about Cranes is that since the darkly beautiful "Adoration", they've learned to use silence and melody as effectively as they've always used volume and distortion. "Wings of Joy" is as staggering, as unnerving in it's whispers as it is in its screams. In "Watersong", the album's quiet, orchestral opener, Alison's plaintive cries are somehow reminiscent of a child forced to perform a requiem for its own dead parents. At the opposite extreme, "Starblood", with its massive tribal drum and scraping metal-on-metal guitar, sounds like a ritual rape in a pressing-plant.
In fact, throughout "Wings of Joy" Alison sounds like she's suffering unendurable agonies. Every song on the album seems propelled by Sadean impulses and, since there's nothing of the masochist about Alison (she looks and sounds so frail, vulnarable and fearful she's obviously a victim of something), there must be something of a sadist about us. To truly enjoy Cranes is to admit to some small but significant degree that you take pleasure in someone else's pain. To go beyond that, to be aroused by Alison and what sounds like a brutilisation of her, is dubious in the extreme. At least finding Cranes abhorrent is ideologically sound. Cranes, probably accidentally, make you ask more questions about sex than Billy Bragg or Michelle Shocked ever could.
"Wings of Joy" is a brilliant, intensely worrying album from one of the most peculiar groups of the last decade. It's a grim, gorgeous Sadean inferno.
Suffer little Children.
THE STUD BROTHERS
("Wings Of Joy" is released on September 9.)
© Melody Maker 1991
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