Cranes – Population Four – Review

Cranes

Population Four (Dedicated)
by Nik Rainey

What happens when Goth wants to grow up? How does the crowd of pale nightcrawlers that clog the dancefloors of Dante’s Inferno Room and Atrophy Night at Club Me Senseless go about shrugging off the shackles (usually storebought) that weigh down their skinny shoulders, tossing aside the bottles of estrogen-for-men and anti-vitamins, and struggling into the light of day? I’m not sure either (and that’s one assimilation process to which I’d rather not bear witness), but I bet they hand out the CranesPopulation Four at the registration desk. Time was, this Portsmouth, U.K. quartet made bleak shriek-musik of the kind of genus that the kohl-minors loved to rattle their malnourished bones to. Now they’re offering up a poppier, more tasteful blend of 2 AM melancholera, all late-eighties mershadelic acousticism (think the Church crossed with post-Psychocandy/pre-disco Mary Chain), non-threatening, spacious arrangements (think Mazzy Star with at least enough energy to get off the damn couch and sway a little), and Alison Shaw’s airy orphan trills (think the Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler as imitated by a mynah bird). Whatever vestiges of power-brood they have left (the tense, eerie “Let Go” excepted) are relegated to touches of atmospheric gray, whether it’s the fuzz-patches that sprout all over “Fourteen,” the atonal, violin-impersonating guitar whinges in “Angel Bell,” or the hyper-phase breakdown that concludes “On Top Of The World.” Elsewise, it’s all shadow-pop with the occasional drip from the roof of the Batcave, full of teasing portents but always keeping one foot out of the grave. Leave your cheekbone implants by the door when you leave, willya?