Craw: “405” (from Craw, 1994)
In 1994 Tower Records had a policy where if you didn’t like what you bought, you could return it and get something else. (That’s how you know this was a pre-filesharing era.) So my friends and I would sift through the bins and if an album cover caught our eye, we’d buy it. That’s how I came across Craw.
I think I can truly trace my transition from metal to indie directly to this record, the self-titled debut from this Cleveland band on a tiny little label called Choke Inc. Unquestionably this was the first album I ever bought that said to me, “there is a whole other kind of music—a whole other kind of approach to music—out there waiting to be discovered.”
“Transition” really is the right word. Craw is undoubtedly a fucking heavy record, so it appealed to me on that primary level. But it’s not exactly metal. Or, it wasn’t the metal I knew: it wasn’t blast beats, wasn’t sludge, wasn’t thrash; the lyrics weren’t about demons or bludgeoning violence or anti-authoritarianism; and the singer didn’t growl or shriek. He just kind of… what the fuck was this singer doing?
I had no way of explaining this band to my friends. Their time signatures and song structures were out of control, and singer, “McTighe”—only surnames were given in the liner notes—was like the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow only way up in the mix and without distortion covering his voice. (Of course I couldn’t make the Yow reference back then… I didn’t know who the Jesus Lizard were.) Depending on your perspective, McTighe’s vocals—really, his whole persona—was either the best part or the worst part of the band’s sound.
Part of the reason McTighe’s vocals sound so wildly all over the place is because his lyrics are written like short stories, with no regard for meter or rhyme. He’s clearly forcing his words to fit the music however he can.
“405” is probably the most immediately compelling track on the record. It begins with a straightforward riff before stuttering into a disorienting rhythm as McTighe comes in first quietly, then a little louder before he’s off to the races in his spastic phrasing. Just listen to the way he says, once the song gets going, the lines “It’s a pattern. I tried to break up with him—he destroyed the paintjob on my car.” McTighe phrases the words like this: “It’s a pat-tern / I tried to break / upwith / HIM / he de-stroyed / thepaintjobonmycar.” You can hear that the lyrics are written as prose, with periods and commas and em-dashes and everything; the compelling thing is that McTighe blatantly disregards that punctuation in his delivery.
The phrasing, coupled with the linear progression of all the songs both lyrically and musically, pulls you in. You start trying to listen to make out just what McTighe is singing about. The words and images you start to capture feel viscerally real—not based in the fantasy world of your everyday metal band. The violence in the songs feels like an everyday kind of violence, not perpetrated by the narrator as in a typical hypermasculine tough-guy metal song, but rather suffered by him, or suffered by those around him. All of the songs on Craw sound as if they were written in the wake of a tragedy—a car accident, a kidnapping, something. McTighe’s stories are told breathlessly, half-intelligible and with the mania of a traumatized victim who can’t tell the story slow enough to get all the facts straight. It’s almost dreamlike.
As the album progresses through its 70 minutes, the songs start to slow down, get longer, more dynamic, less frenetic. McTighe’s stories start to feel more and more tragic, more and more anguished. You’ve completely adjusted to McTighe’s weird vocal delivery and the blistering music, free of choruses or much repetition; you’re just down in whatever hole these stories are trying to bury themselves in.
