Album Reviews // Jinx - Crumb

14^th July 2019

Jinx is a concentric infinity loop; a chasm with a soporific and psychedelic synth pop siren down it. The lines between falling and diving are blurred, either way you’re in headfirst.

After releasing a couple of EPs of tuning up Crumb serve up this chemical soup; tight molecules of jazz, psych, pop and theatre catalysed by adolescent theatrics, exchanging atoms of energy amidst a glow of colour. The languid melodies resolve over and over in muted bursts of arpeggiated synth and guitar, each one as predictable and beguiling as an old friend.

Cracking breaks out like a new day, faltering and measured in its movements. Lila Ramani and her guitar pace up and down as the band’s broad brushstrokes begin to fill in the album’s canvas. The horns recall Albert Ayler in bright morning, brassy tones with the bombast of a 1920s New Orleans cabaret band manipulated into free jazz shapes.

This is handled by Jesse Brotter (bass) and Jonathan Gilad (drums), adding edge to the creamier lounge piano passages and gleaming sax blasts. There’s always a hiccup or trip in the perambulating rhythm; like the guitar loops and skipped beats on Ghostride that are stirred by Ramani’s metronomic meander. It keeps the dream pop reverb wasteland that so many bands get deserted in at bay with a tension that the soaring chorus resolves.

If not a rhythmic spasm we get a familiar axis for the song to spin round, like the hip hop groove on Nina. Ramani sings of the kind of social paranoiac empathy we feel now that everyone’s problems, for better or worse, are everyone else’s – “she can play the game, always speaks to us the same”. Elsewhere the lyrics can read like stalker manifestos (M.R.) and existential urban breakdowns (And It Never Ends) but, like the shifting rhythm section, their poetic jaggedness adds vital emotion and violence to the textures of the album.

Ramani plunges into new depth too, colouring “blood…a dark purple shade” on Part III where Coltrane modalities in Brian Aronow’s resonating chords are blended with Canterbury dream prog. From the void between Tame Impala’s Currents and The Nightmare Before Christmas the spiralling murk continues on And It Never Ends. Seesawing between two chords like the Velvet Underground on Valium it lumbers through a garden of oppressive electronic tones flowering into mad dissonance with the guitar wail.

There is a lull in the middle of the album between indie punches and jazz curlicues; on M.R. antique melodies reminiscent of Jockstrap are mangled into a film noir outro but the perfume gets stale as it persists through The Letter, wherein Crumb like many before them soar too close to The Beatles. Faces too, where the Portishead-y gloom remains unformed, feels like it wants to go somewhere and doesn’t. On a very short album Crumb sometimes struggle to find space for individual dazzling or an explicit catch-all concept.

There’s a tantalising glimpse of dazzle on the title track, as Crumb take unconventional avenues in the structure and production. Ramani assures us “we all get lost but we all come back”, mirroring the music and the performances start developing, with a powerful bass line, suspense in the beat and shining keys surfacing alternately from the swirling noise. Like on Jinx, the most recent single Fall Down is another highlight concluding jazz pop noodlings with a crash of feedback à la Get Away-era Yuck or Sparklehorse. The flat electric drumming and playground vocal give it a grungy, ironic flair sharpening the dissonant guitar tones.

It’s on tracks like these, at the front and back ends of the record where Crumb earn their crust. They demonstrate a hive mind ability to bend and filter the onslaught of their powerful sound, striking out at tangents and exchanging foreground and background. These glimmers of adventure should assure further releases, but some harsher tones and spikier frequencies might deliver a couple more standout moments for the stream and download fed audience. Which is ironic because the whole thing would function well as a 27 minute single on the b-side of a forgotten lo-fi prog opus. Listened to as an LP it’s an apathetic epic on modern isolation that’ll creep up on you like love, hold you down and very serenely, mellifluously ravish you.