craw - 1993-1997 Box Set

Pitchfork 83

Listen to enough music, and go to enough shows, and you're bound to stumble across an unknown artist that blows you away and makes you wish you had the means to put their music in front of every serious listener you know. Sure, there's a perverse thrill in digging on something that few other people know about, but it can actually be painful to harbor a lifelong love for band that's been all but erased from history.

That might sound a tad dramatic to you, but it's a safe bet that it doesn't sound that way to Hank Shteamer, the producer and driving force behind this three-album box set. (Full disclosure: Shteamer is an occasional contributor to Pitchfork). As a 16-year-old, Shteamer's mind was so thoroughly blown by the Cleveland quintet craw that no other music has affected him in quite the same way since. He currently plays drums in STATS and Aa, serves as senior music editor at rollingstone.com, and continues to chart connections between metal and jazz via his interview blog, Heavy Metal Be-Bop. With this box, listeners get an opportunity to re-trace Shteamer's steps through the band's first three albums. (craw's fourth and final LP, 2002's Bodies for Strontium 90, is still available via Hydra Head.)

If you've never heard craw's work, you'd have every reason to be skeptical about how it might hold up in a climate where even groups like the Dillinger Escape Plan and Gorguts have a hard time keeping up with the accelerated mutation they inspired in other bands with their classic output. Indeed, Lost Nation Road, craw's 1994 sophomore LP, includes a song, "Bypass," that drifts uncomfortably close to the silt-coated riverbed that Tool illustrated so memorably on 1993's landmark Undertow. "Bypass" is immediately followed by "Botulism, Cholera + Tarik," a chaotic saxophone orgy (courtesy of guest horn players Matt Dufresne and Marcus Rosinski) that recalls the expulsive spirit of Mr. Bungle splattered with a little John Zorn for good measure.

Other than those two moments, however, this set demonstrates over and over how craw found their way to their own musical island, and listening to these three albums for the first time today is like traveling to a remote, untouched location and discovering strange wildlife and fauna that have evolved in genetic isolation. If you were forced to categorize this music—or, more aptly, to describe it in terms that people will understand—craw carved out a space where post-hardcore, technical metal, math rock, and experimental noise all flow together under a hazy smog of something that resembles jazz, but isn't always clearly definable as such.

Craw specialized in shifting, nonlinear song structures where rhythms, riffs, harmonies, and atmospheres seep into one another—a stark contrast from the enduring metal/post-hardcore standard where bands flash their chops by stringing together part after part after part. Craw actually had more in common with Pony Express Record-era Shudder to Think and These Arms Are Snakes than they ever did with Botch or Converge, and an unhinged semblance of jazz permeates their material like a spectral presence. Of course, their music sounds more fitting of a psychiatric ward than the urbane lounges—or even the piss-stained lower-Manhattan sidewalks—that jazz was heavily associated with in the '90s.

As much as bands like Candiria and Shining deserve credit for transplanting horns into their respective takes on street-level hardcore and black metal, craw were clearly aiming for a creative dimension you can't arrive at by stylistic gene-splicing alone. Neil Chastain, who played drums on the first two albums, helped shape craw's warped sense of structure by applying concepts he'd discovered in the music of Neubauten and Edgard Varèse. Likewise, guitarist and self-described "math and science geek" Rockie Brockway used a numbers-based system to write riffs. But those things don't necessarily do justice to the sound that craw came up with. "We were trying," Chastain recalls, "to dig through your comfort layers and make you feel something." The realization that this band was searching for something intangible lurks at every turn, but as you grow more familiar with craw's vocabulary, that "something" remains as vague and hard to pinpoint as it must have sounded to people's ears in the mid-'90s. And it is that mystery that ultimately pulls you in.

Shteamer recalls that at the six or seven craw shows he attended, there were fewer—"sometimes far fewer"—than 20 people in the room. Unsurprisingly, he brings a missionary's fervor to documenting the band's history via an accompanying 200-page book that comes stuffed with interviews (conducted by Shteamer himself), a complete catalog's worth of lyrics, and an abundance of photos, show flier and album artwork (much of it courtesy of famed cover artist Derek Hess), handwritten notes, a complete gigging history as best as everyone can remember it, and miscellaneous ephemera including a merch order invoice. According to Shteamer, even the most diehard experi-metal aficionados have never heard of craw, but this box presents as thorough an opportunity to play catch-up as one could ever hope to get for any artist, let alone a band that makes Barkmarket and Thought Industry look like household names by comparison.

The lyric sheets and voluminous interviews included in the book give listeners plenty of perspective on frontman Joe McTighe's way with words, but suffice it to say that his images walk the fine line between demented and acutely aware—much in the same way schizophrenics can appear at once utterly detached from "reality" while speaking with intuitive precision about their surroundings. McTighe's reference to the car-bombing of real-life environmental activist Judi Bari is as captivating as it is uncomfortable to stomach—and just one of many examples that set his lyrics in a class by themselves. Likewise, even through his barking/gurgling/whispering style, McTighe's words are almost always intelligible. Some heavy bands—the majority of them, arguably—play heavy music to aggress, to go fists-up and balls-out into life. For others such as craw, heaviness represents a barrier behind which one retreats and stews in observation of the outside world.

Early on in their career, craw moved away from a riff-based approach and began writing as an ensemble. It shows, more or less, from note one of this set. Musicians in particular should find craw's approach to structure especially illuminating, even though, when taken as one entire chunk, it's sometimes difficult to tell one album apart from another. It doesn't help that Steve Albini's thoroughly unremarkable recording style fails to capture the raw immediacy of a band in the room while also forcing the band to shy away from using the studio as a means to create the atmosphere and "album feel" that its material rightfully called for. Luckily, though, there are times when the audio mix recalls the charming timbre of the cassette demos that were common during craw's years of activity.

In any case, long before you arrive at 1997's Map, Monitor, Surge it becomes obvious that craw didn't fit any of the commonly accepted storylines that media outlets like this one depend on and, essentially, manufacture. And unlike, say, Helmet or the Jesus Lizard, craw didn't benefit from a media climate that embraced their exotic other-ness and allow them to exist in multiple camps simultaneously. Who knows what other factors played into craw's career trajectory, but looking back it's easy to imagine that this band was more or less destined for obscurity.

In the best sense of the term, craw's music is an acquired taste. Immediately on hitting play, one understands that this was not a band that got to the point quickly or shied away from making long, drawn-out albums. Sometimes, though, more does end up being more. And this box provides an appropriately exhaustive vehicle for taking the time it requires to sit with and digest a body of work that's still revealing itself to a lifelong fan like Hank Shteamer so long after the fact. Listening back, you have to wonder how many other trailblazing groups have existed that you'll never know about. But as you work your way through 1993-1997, you do get the distinct impression that none of them sounded quite like this.