By Monk
I shuffle through the mounting snow, the cold biting at my exposed face and hands. The relentless wind cuts through my thin clothing and no feeling remains in my sodden feet. I’m long past the point where I could turn back, but then there’s nothing left to return to anyway. I’m a walking corpse, just waiting to fall down. The bitterness threatens to choke me, even before the cold can stop my heart. All the words I swallowed, all the dreams I buried… the hopes I’d carried from childhood that I cast into the dirt as if they were nothing. The friends I turned away from, the standards I lowered, the cruelties I accepted and committed… all to be embraced by the ones who ‘mattered’, the ones whose words – empty as they were – somehow carried weight and value. I broke myself apart for the love of the unlovable, whose blood was fetid ichor. All of this to die alone. All of this for nothing…
It may be the height of summer – allegedly – but there is a sense of bleak dankness in the air, a dark chill permeating the atmosphere, accompanied by dark clouds looming large on the horizon, cold winds blowing across the sun-baked landscape and bringing with them a sense of impending death, destruction and doom-laden omniscience. Yes, Belfast’s explorers and exponents of everything dark, doomy and deathly have come crawling back out of the city’s sleech beds to deliver this, a third album more than capable of sinking every ship ever built by the local shipyard with its sheer weight of majesty.
Opening with a suitably militaristic snare-led beat, underpinned by a deep, growling bass rhythm, ‘March Of The Worm’ immediately stamps and stomps its way into both your aural cortices and the darkest recesses of your soul, its dank, winding riff overtopped by Stuart’s typically laconic growl, the song picking up the pace via typically iconoclastic blastbeat interventions and then descending back into the darkest recesses of the darkest recesses (sic) of your blackened soul like the well-oiled machine this trio have become over the past decade.
Laconic is one word which is well applied to any descriptive of The Crawling’s sound, as it is more often about what is left out than what is included, that sense of anticipation that there is going to be a note here, and chord there, only for the emptiness of the sonic space to make the impact all the more impressive with that sense of desolation accentuated by the bleakness of that snatched moment of hopeless hopefulness.
Even on epic tracks such as ‘Another Vulture’ and ‘Bound To The Negative’, which clock in at more than seven and eight minutes respectively, there is a sense that less is more, with even the almost jazz-like extrapolations of the latter’s main thematic sounding remarkably restrained, while at the same time the tumultuous peaks and troughs of violence and placidity collaborate and intertwine to sublime effect.
In between these, we have what is arguably the album’s cornerstone track, the absolutely HUGE ‘Thy Nazarene’, which highlights the opus’ overarching theme of ultimate loneliness and exclusivity with incisiveness and precision. Possibly the most restrained track the trio have ever produced, it is all the more impactful for being so. Stuart’s vocals cut deep into your heart, while the punchy bass/guitar combination of light and shade mixes sublimely with Gary’s equally balanced but behemothic display of percussive grace.
‘All Of This…’ is perhaps The Crawling’s most lucid, most accessible offering to date, combining the band’s inherent sense of darkness with some beautifully coherent touches of deftness and, dare I say, lightness, which permeate and pierce the gloom of the overall density and gravitas with moments of crafted clarity yet not enough to detract or distract from the overall coldness of another titanic (sic) opus from three of the best exponents of their collective crafts.
- ‘All Of This For Nothing‘ is out now.
- The Crawling headline the Grand Declaration Of War all-dayer at Belfast’s Mandela Hall on Saturday 26 August. They then play the Tap ‘n’ Tumbler in Nottingham on Thursday 5 October, the Bank Top Tavern in Oldham on Friday 6 October, with further dates to follow.
- All content © Über Rock. Not to be reproduced in part or in whole without the express written permission of Über Rock.