(written by Islander)
Within the dark domains of death/doom Northern Ireland’s The Crawling hold a special place for this writer and others at our nefarious site. Their music is not comfortable, because they have devoted themselves to renderings of “lonely desolation, bleak truths and never healing wounds of loss and regret” (not our words, but they speak accurately), yet their records have been so powerful on both a raw sonic level and emotionally that they stand out, and we go back to them.
We’re three years on from The Crawling’s last album of new music, All of This for Nothing, and soon we will have something more from them, a new two-song EP named What We Leave Behind (they also released a fantastic live album this past January, which you can find here).
What we have for you today is an exceptionally well-made video for the first of these two tracks, “A Song To Nurse The Sickness“, and while we will of course share our own thoughts about it, we’ll turn back to the previously quoted press materials for their own evocative introduction:
[A]s we reach the darker, shorter days of this troubled year [The Crawling] offer up another powerful addition to their untarnished canon – an EP that lays bare our troubling obsession with the places, people, events and emotions of our past, examining the way in which we strive to live in the unreliable recollections of times gone by, the loves and losses, joys and heartaches, elevating them above our present and undermining our hope of a meaningful future. This is What We Leave Behind…
Or, to quote vocalist/guitarist Andy Clarke:
“The EP is an acknowledgement that the past is behind us. We spend too long lamenting what has been, rather than being mindful of the present and the joy it can bring. Then, when we finally realise time has slipped away, we begin mourning that as well. The constant mourning of time is a sickness.”
“A Song To Nurse the Sickness” immediately creates a dark and dolorous mood. Even with the drums going off in vivid rumbles and the bass creating an urgent throb, the guitars seem to claw, drag, and wail — gritty in tone and distressing in mood. And while those disturbed wailing tones persist, The Crawling also start heavily jolting the listener.
All of those sensations join together to create the song’s overture, which paves the way for gritty, growled vocals of frightening intensity and commanding power, and a melody that slowly groans, miserably weeps, and pulsates like the forlorn pleading of a troubled soul.
The band dial up the intensity, manifesting the self-damage addressed in the song’s themes — doubling the harsh vocals, injecting the feverishness of tremolo’d riffing, and cranking up the rhythm section’s punch. They leaven that with a brief bass-led interlude and a heart-breaking guitar solo, but there seems to be as much anger in the music as grief — and the vocals are unmistakably fierce.
Finally, we’ll turn back to Andy Clarke for his comment about the song, and then leave you to it:
“A Song to Nurse the Sickness is about the way we romanticise and repeatedly revisit parts of our past, even when doing so is destructive. Nostalgia can become something we actively feed; reshaping memories, preserving old wounds and allowing them to affect who we are now. The song is really about recognising that behaviour for what it is and the damage that comes from refusing to let the past remain where it belongs.”
As mentioned, the new EP includes two songs. We’ll turn back to the press materials for a description of the second one:
“Completing the EP and closing a chapter in The Crawling’s story is ‘Bound To The Negative (Requiem)’, a remarkable acoustic rebirth for one of the band’s finest songs, which appeared in its original, fiercer form on All Of This For Nothing. The song’s strength is illustrated by its ability to take on this new mantle and retain its emotional heft and bleak splendour.
“This is a genuine act of transformation, the band reaching into the grim nobility of the original and drawing out the glimmering threads of melody and reweaving them anew, capturing an aura of medieval balladry. Its sound and perspective have been reshaped, but the conclusion remains unchanged – mirroring the way in which memory repeatedly revises the past without fundamentally altering what actually happened.”
EP CREDITS: Drums were recorded at The Parlour Recording Studios (The Haunted, At The Gates, Napalm Death, etc), and all other aspects of the production were kept in-house — guitars and vocals recorded by Andy Clarke; bass recorded by Adrien Crozet; mixing and mastering by Andy Clarke. The album features evocative artwork by Redamaut (Perpetual Paradox, Mother Crone, Altar Of Moss, etc).
What We Leave Behind will be released on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats by Grindscene Records, on October 2nd.
PRE-ORDER:
https://thecrawlingband.bandcamp.com/album/what-we-leave-behind
THE CRAWLING:
http://www.thecrawlingband.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/thecrawlingband
http://www.instagram.com/thecrawlingband