Crows – Reason Enough
Crows – Reason Enough
Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders
Alienation, unemployment, riots, brutalist cityscapes,….. despair … yes, it’s another post punk revival.
Enter, Crows.
Where have they been?
Actually Crows have been active for a number of years already. Reason Enough is their third long player and it is also their best to date. With Reason Enough it feels as though Crows are making a shift away from the Stooges style sludge and Idles-adjacent rants that personified their previous work towards a more melodic sound. It’s a brighter home for their dark messaging. I’m loath to pile onto the raft of comparisons, chiefly Interpol as I’m pretty sure that’s the type of pegging that Crows are trying to shake off. Nevertheless the new album benefits from the increased tunefulness. Personally I have always preferred my slice of doom served warm.
The second ‘change up’ comes in terms of ambition. Reason Enough is more anthemic than its predecessors, unabashedly so. Crows are at their most accessible to date with songs such as Living On My Knees and latest single Vision Of Me. Here they verge upon the likes of Ist Ist and Slow Readers and one can imagine them filling large venues with hooks like these. Yet long-standing Crows fans need not panic. The angst and steeliness are still present – witness the heft of title track ,the gnarly gut-punch of Bored, and the reverberated, Gang Of Four-esque closer, D-Gent.
Why does this sound, this style of music keep coming back? It is because it speaks to the times we live in, oppressively bleak times. In Europe, post punk never really went away. In the UK it did fade briefly because we “wanted to be free, to get loaded and have a good time”, etc (How that working out btw?) The post-punk sound will always come back because it chimes with us, just like the guitars on Reason Enough.
The grandchildren of Joy Division are leaving school. Man you grew up fast!