If you gave a track like “Sunday’s Cool” a good enough spit-shine, dusted off the hiss and scoured off the grimey distortion…you’d have what we like to call a pop-gem. A rollicking beat, a churning guitar with hooks that dip, snap and twirl, and a soulfully rasped vocal with a pingpongy melody that rams the earworm refrain into your brain for assured re-whistlings-to-yourself later in the day.
But we’re then breezed into the comforting-yet-ominous drones of “Pine Box,” a full 60 seconds of a meditative hum spreading itself out with synthesized crickets creepily chirping at its corners and our singer, Turn To Crime progenitor Derek Stanton, comes sawing in like a shooting star descending upon the nocturnal, uneasy ambiance, the strangely beautiful tone of his voice giving off a dark radiance, a grainy kind of sparkle – the guitars looping in that lullaby-ish slow-dance phrasing you’d expect from early 60’s doo-wop, barely discernible beneath the lovely and, yes, eerie, atmospherics.
We don’t know if it’s T. Rex or Suicide or Velvet Underground or Jesus & Mary Chain – but the charm of Turn To Crime is that keen knack for the gnarled, the delicate dressing of distortion, the delicious mangling of a pop song into something much more mutant and altogether enticing; nostalgic made to sound alien. Oh, just dig through it, curious listener, on into the screech and the boogie, the push and the pull, the tripped-out echoes of its nearly 8-minute closer, aptly titled “Nightmares.”
Take a listen:
Can’t Love comes out July 1st on Mugg & Bopp/Old Flame.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2014.
