Craw - Entire Discography
Someone anonymously left me a comment and left me a link to the Craw home page where it seems they are giving away all of their recorded material. They have all their albums and all the splits and live tracks they have. You have no idea how exciting this is. Craw is an aggresive band from Cleveland, Ohio who existed in the early 90's. Their album Map, Monitor, Surge was one of my favorite albums at the time, and I often wondered what happened to my copy. I finally purchased Lost Nation Road, and though I was happy, it is Map Monitor Surge and the first album that really blew me away. Thanks to band I have the ability to listen to all of them and Map, Monitor, Surge and the S/T are still amazing to this day.
The band is sick, twisted, primal, pounding, scathing, massive, and mathematical in their approach. The singer seems well read as the lyrics tread some esoteric categories such as Brownian Motion. All the lyrics are available through the site as well so you can see how good, and twisted all of them are. The singer sounds like Steve Albini from Big Black and Shellac. (Steve Albini also produced two of their albums) If you are fan of that or any heavy math rock like early Don Caballero or Rodan then you are off to a good start and will probably have no trouble getting into this. If you like hardcore or metal, or bands like early Isis and Tool then you should be an instant fan. The songs are complex, and heavy as a ton of bricks on the head. Having gotten into a lot of Doom Metal these days I have become very fond of thick distorted guitars and it seems Craw had been using and abusing amps with the same hellish abandon that many bands now do these days. There is really alot going on in these songs, including some jazzy passages, some with brass instruments, and plenty of tortured vocals and vast rhythmic crescendos, and plenty of prog like exploratory passages.
If you need a place to start, go with the aformentioned Map, Monitor, Surge or the self titled first record. I'd be interested in hearing what you think of the band.
And if you are feeling the philanthropy you can donate money to the band, who apparently are still together in some hibernating form.
posted by blend77 at 9:50 AM
4 Comments:
Hey Hey, greetings from Terry in Calgary, Canada, and thanks for spreading their word (I left the comment)...I started listening to the first two albums in '95 as a curious college radio dj...they took a while to get into, so much dischord, so much wandering...trying to picture how they structured their songs was difficult for me, but the music took, and I never tired of it. Map Monitor Surge seems to be intentionally tighter and less experimental, but still so much less genre fitting or formulaic than so many other bands....I still find that Iceburn somehow remind me of Craw, though they don't sound similar at first. I agree with the prog like passages, jazzy bits...and I also really like the emotion the singer manages to inject in many of 'em. I'm happy to see this post, and I hope people are turned onto this band; I feel that they should have been so much better known....
definitely...thanks for the link, this was great stuff to hear again....i share your sentiments, and it always makes it difficult to do a review on a band like this because of how different they are.
anyway, it seems as if the band is still slightly functional, so maybe we will hear more inthe future...
take care terry, thanks for chattin.
-t
a very, very good band !
definitely same wavelength...
maaaan, post those albums, splits, weverything again! website is down, but I need this!! awesome band
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