CHAD CRUMM seems to have things pretty well nailed down. He runs his own studio in a restored barn, produces and works with two or three other bands, lives in a pretty nice part of New York State and has a whole string of talents.
At the core he is a fiddle player, and Swimming Hole opens up with a maddeningly infectious fiddle tune that warns us, in a surreptitiously North African Gypsy sort of way, that this isn’t going to be your standard country swing record. Perhaps "Thank You Very Nice" is a shade too intrusive for my taste. Its nagging eight or nine fiddle notes cut right into the front end of a sensitive musical appreciation, and take a lot of shaking loose.
But it is only one minute 37, and it winds along with plenty of interesting sonic distractions that prefigure the delights to come. Mostly they seem to have come from a large private collection of samples and software synth patches that CHAD CRUMM handles and dispenses with a deft touch throughout the album.
The sampled soprano voice that follows (in "Incanartus Baby") is balm enough. Taken from a radio broadcast of classic American composer John Knowles Paine's Mass in D it lifts our spirits and our sights. The digital architecture that surrounds it is mysterious and right. This album isn’t just different – it has high standards and intends to meet and surpass them. By now all musical channels are wide open and ready to receive.
The rest of the album adds unsettling lyric content and yards and yards of inventive folk cubism. Acoustic instrumentation and digital fragments are meticulously gathered and arranged. A lugubrious voice speaks/sings astonishingly unexpected words. Somewhere in my database of referents, the screens allocated to Bill Callaghan, Yo La Tengo and Tom Waits flicker on and off. There are no Americans more American than the ones who seem to be permanent foreigners in their own backyard. CRUMM sings of Rio and Philadelphia and is haunted by personal moments of passion and guilt.
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"Sewertrout" is a major work of eco-political imagination. "Closer to the Man Up Above" does God, faith and technology. "Rio" is beautiful tune, beautifully played and sung, crammed with magical realist imagery and disturbing dreams of fecundity and decay. The contradictions and unsettled tensions confuse, beguile, amuse, and ultimately heal: "the girls have no teeth but that's good enough for me" is a line among many to be quoted and remembered. The whole picture is vivid, truthful and compelling. Close attention to detail is strongly recommended.
The Village of Trumansburg, New York must be a very weird place. They have a Community Skate Park Committee and Chad Crumm.
www.musictankrecording.com
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