ALBUM REVIEW – CRAWLING QUIET – BETWEEN SHADOWS AND LIGHT
It’s releases like this that have me scratching my head and wishing certain musicians/bands would stay in their homes and rehearsal rooms a bit longer and actually learn how to play and sing properly. Learn your craft to an at least reasonably proficient level before you put it on public display.
This kind of monotonous dirge gives heavy music a bad name. They call themselves ‘Heavy Metal’, and yet Crawling Quiet sound like they’ve barely stepped out of the garage. Heavy Metal is all about intensity, drama, complexity, the expression of strong emotion and of course highly skilled musicianship. This Canuck outfit display none of these features whatsoever. Zip. Instead they choose to crank out tired, hackneyed old riffs and grooves that Black Sabbath were doing 40 years ago (and, it almost doesn’t even need to be said, doing it infinitely better), and generally assaulting our poor unsuspecting eardrums with classless trash. And can somebody PLEASE teach the vocalist how to sing IN KEY?
I’m struggling severely to find positives. They crank things up a little with ‘Sleepless Light’, whose main riff is somewhat engaging before the song descends into a half arsed attempt at Thrash. ‘Neily’s Jig’ is an absolute anomaly in a veritable ocean of mediocrity, a highly unexpected Celtic Folk jam. Unfortunately it only provides a very brief respite before ‘Muddy Water’ arrives, sounding like something the Muppets would do. I’d expect Kermit, Dr Teeth, Animal and Zoot to display higher levels of instrumental dexterity and compositional nous however.
My advice to Crawling Quiet: either go away and lock yourselves in a room for four or five years and practice, both individually and as a band, before you resurface to release anything else, or if you can’t wait that long, just make the world a more pleasant place and give it away. It gets *.
Rod Whitfield
