craw weekend 2016: It's a wrap

craw at Saint Vitus
Photo: Remi Thornton

The previous post was about my reaction to the craw-centric events of the past few days. All I wrote there applies to my experiences of the Cleveland and NYC shows, which surpassed any and all expectations. (Go here for photo and video evidence.) But I left Saint Vitus last night with a different feeling, call it a community awareness, a sense of how an intense, bizarre and uncompromising underground band can become a portal to a shared feeling of transcendence.

I saw so many fans moved on such a deep level by these performances, both those who had seen the band back in the day and those who never got the chance. I saw band members giddy with disbelief at finally getting the reception they'd always deserved but rarely ever got before. I saw a mutual celebration of the enduring art that craw created, honed and perfected with painstaking effort all those years ago. I saw 75 minutes of classic songs, performed with pure spirit fire and channeled through a frontman who radiates a raving, possessed intensity. I saw sublime musical terror of exactly the sort I remember witnessing when I was a teenager—and all while standing within inches of some of my dearest, oldest KC friends (shouts to Drew, Kyle and Jeff), who saw craw with me the first time around, and my NYC blood brothers, who have loved the band's records for years but hadn't seen them play.

It was all just beyond magical. In particular, I want to thank Drew (a.k.a. Remi Thornton) for coming along for the ride and taking some brilliant pictures; Northern Spy and Aqualamb for all their hard work on the box set; my friends and STATS bandmates Joe and Tony (and constant comrade / special guest Nick) for sharing the stage with me at Saint Vitus; the Great Iron Snake, Murderedman and Black Black Black for their great opening sets; the Grog Shop and Saint Vitus for being such gracious hosts; Esra Y., Ron K., John P. and Georgia Z. for the CLE hospitality; Brad Cohan, Evan Harms and all the other writers who previewed the shows; new friends Patrick W. and Rob H. for their enthusiasm and fellowship; all the kind, gracious fans I met at both shows; and of course Chris, Rockie, Neil, Zak, Dave, Joe and Will for playing (and screaming) their asses off. I also want to thank Torsten Meyer for the following video. (More documentation of both shows coming soon.)


Lastly, I want to thank Pyrrhon vocalist and writer extraordinaire Doug Moore for putting together the below article on the band, a fine piece featuring insightful commentary from craw's Joe McTighe. The piece was slated to run before the shows, but did not go live as planned. I reproduce it here for posterity, and as a complement to the wealth of articles found here.

Full-spirit wince (or: craw 2016, an invitation)

Joe McTighe and Will Scharf of craw, with the author in background. Photo: Remi Thornton

I have often called craw my favorite band. To declare something one's favorite anything is a forceful but not all that evocative statement—one that holds little meaning for anyone who isn't saying it. Yesterday, though, sitting on the floor in a rehearsal space in a dingy building behind a lumber yard in Cleveland, watching and listening to craw rehearse for their shows tonight in town at the Grog Shop and tomorrow at Brooklyn's Saint Vitus, I felt like I had a better sense of exactly what I've meant by that all these years.

We speak of being "moved" by music, or any kind of art. That is to say, we're taken somewhere. Sometimes that transport is gentle, a subtle and gradual conveyance. Other times, it's more urgent. To some degree, any heavy music is transportive—exposure to extreme volume, way beyond the cacophony of, say, an average urban commute, has a certain automatic effect. But what I realized about craw's music yesterday, as vocalist Joe McTighe howled and grimaced over writhing stop-start cadences, monumental swells and catharses, and perversely shimmying riffs, is that it is essentially unbearable. It elicits in me a kind of full-spirit wince, a masochistic thrill.

It is so harsh and unrelenting, but also so full of naked feeling and twisted insight. Their creations are fanatical, fantastical, so bizarrely outside the realm of what so much other music, even heavy music in craw's general aesthetic ballpark, would ever think to attempt. It is a private, insular art, so clearly in service, first and foremost, to its creators' obsessive vision. It doesn't care if you're listening, and yet its self-presentation is, for all its complexity, immaculate. It is a hyperarticulate shriek, so stupendously apart from the notion that music is meant to accompany anything, even, say, stereotypical metal behaviors such as headbanging or moshing. You don't do anything in its presence except for behold it, and, in my case—and I've seen this reaction in a few others—sort of tremble before it, fascination mingling with fear. That feeling is the closest thing to the sublime that I have known in art—it's the same for me now as it was 20 years ago.

And having seen the 2016 incarnation of craw up close, I can tell you that the magic is intact. I'm happy to report that this band—bands, really, since craw is performing this weekend in at least two equally brilliant but completely different lineups—can still pin you against the wall. Consider this an invitation to come experience the feeling for yourself:

Cleveland tonight (Friday, 3/11/16).
NYC tomorrow (Saturday, 3/12/16).

See you there. You can follow the weekend's progress on Facebook and Instagram.

craw, '1993–1997' is out

Today marks the release of the new Kickstarter-funded craw box set on Northern Spy Records (designed by Aqualamb), as well as the digital release of the individual remastered albums that make up the set. It makes me happy beyond words to see this music back out there in the world.

Here are some links to explore:

1993–1997
Northern Spy
Bandcamp
iTunes
Amazon
Spotify


As well as some press coverage:

Tiny Mix Tapes (review)
Noisey (feature)
New York Times (1993–1997 included in the 2015 Holiday Gift Guide; scroll down to the Music section, Pop & Jazz)

craw, booked

Received physical proofs for the 200-page bound books that will come packaged with the upcoming craw vinyl box set. Contents include a complete, previously unpublished oral history of the band, newly proofed lyrics, tons of photos and ephemera, etc.

Couldn't be happier to see this dream project—20 years in the making, all in all, and my eat/sleep/breathe obsession for the past couple years—become a reality. Thank you to all Kickstarter backers, Aqualamb and Northern Spy. (And to Ben Young for crucial inspiration.)

Can't wait to send 1993–1997 out into the world.

craw: release date + reunion shows

Just wanted to share some exciting news re: the craw reissue…

The box set, titled 1993–1997, will be out 12/11/15 from Northern Spy, with design by the fine folks at Aqualamb. Go here for preorders, and to read a detailed description of the release.

Craw will be playing two special reunion shows in support of the release. All seven ex-members of the band will be present at each show, performing material from all four of their studio albums in rotating lineups. This has never happened before and most likely won't happen again. These will be the first craw shows of any sort since 2010, the first craw shows featuring vocalist Joe McTighe since 2002 and the first featuring the band's classic five-piece configuration since 1997.

Friday, 12/18/15
The Grog Shop; Cleveland, OH
Info/tickets here

Saturday, 12/19/15
Saint Vitus; Brooklyn, NY
Info/tickets here

Currently

I'm generally superstitious about announcing events before they come to pass, but now seems like the right time to mention that on Monday, July 20, I'll be starting a new full-time job as a senior editor at RollingStone.com. I'm thrilled and grateful for the opportunity.

I leave behind a dream job (a series of them, really) at Time Out New York, a publication where I spent 10 great years. I'm tempted to shout out all my TONY friends and former colleagues, who helped make the past decade of my working life exceedingly rewarding, challenging and fun, but I'm worried I'll leave out a crucial name or two.

Best just to say a heartfelt thanks to all those folks, as well as everyone else I've worked with during this time: publicists, bookers, artists and just about anyone who devotes their life to the business of music in NYC. It's been wonderful collaborating with you, and even though my new job will have more of a national focus, I look forward to furthering those relationships as time goes on.

I'll still be checking out as much music as possible, live and recorded, and covering it whenever and however I can—including, as always, on DFSBP. Once I'm settled in, I'll post my new work e-mail address for anyone who might want to get in touch. Please feel to get in touch via e-mail: hank [dot] shteamer [at] rollingstone [dot] com.

*****

With help from my partners at Northern Spy and Aqualamb, I'm hard at work on my Kickstarter-funded dream project, the craw box set. I'll post any major updates concerning the release here, but you can also keep tabs on all craw-related matters via Facebook.

*****

My own band STATS, in which I play drums and share vocal and composition duties with my dear friends Tony Gedrich (bass) and Joe Petrucelli (guitar), will release a new LP, Mercy—our debut full-length—via New Atlantis Records on August 8, 2015. Go here for more info; stream a track here; and stream a different track and read an interview here. If you listen, please listen loud.

Your attention, please: Craw Kickstarter 2.0

Update: I'm thrilled to report that the second Craw Kickstarter has reached and exceeded its goal. The box set will be out later this year from Northern Spy. Our fund-raiser is still live through Tuesday, June 2, at 9pm EST; go here to preorder the music in both vinyl and digital formats.

Go here to hear a five-song Craw sampler.

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In March of 2014, I launched a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of reissuing three records by Craw, my favorite band of all time, in a limited-edition vinyl box set. I did as much research as I could, but I was in over my head. This was the gesture of a fan, not of someone who had any idea what it meant to put out records. I counted on my enthusiasm for the project to carry me through, and while I failed to meet the financial goal I set, I was thrilled with the response.

On Monday, May 4, I'm relaunching this effort. (I will add the link here as soon as the new campaign is live.) The basic objective is the same: to reissue Craw's first three albums, all out of print for roughly 20 years, as a limited-edition vinyl box set. But the details are very different.

Much of the constructive criticism I received re: the first campaign was that my numbers were off—the asking price for the box set was simply too high. At the time, since I had put so much work into the campaign, I wasn't really interested in hearing feedback. I believed in the project, and I was devoted to my original vision. But after the fund-raiser ended and I was able to take a step back, I could see that the numbers were in fact flawed. Because of what one commenter referred to as "the economics of scale," producing 300 copies of the set rather than the intended 100 would greatly lower the per-unit price. Still, though, I wasn't sure I was ready to get back on the Kickstarter merry-go-round—as anyone who has launched a fund-raiser on that or any other platform could tell you, it's a rewarding but somewhat draining experience. For a while, I was very close to relaunching a digital-only reissue effort, obviously a drastically less costly endeavor. This seemed like the most direct route to my true goal, which is to properly situate Craw in the discussion surrounding progressive, aggressive underground rock music (post-hardcore, left-field metal, math rock, art rock, noise rock, what have you; all are inadequate to describe this band, but they're as close as one can get when speaking in shorthand), to get the sounds in people's ears and let the records speak for themselves, which I knew they would.

But vinyl was the holy grail all along. To reissue out-of-print albums on vinyl, especially in a collector-friendly, properly annotated, handsomely designed box set (Triple Point's Ben Young specializes in previously unreleased music, but aesthetically, something like call it art is the gold standard for me), is to restore the dignity of the music in question, to say, "For whatever reason, or combination of reasons, these sounds, so laboriously, lovingly crafted, have been overlooked. Let's re-present and reexamine these great works."

Enter Northern Spy, a label I've been a fan of for quite some time. I am extremely grateful to the men that run this label, Adam Downey and Tom Abbs, for saying to me, "Let's give this another shot." And not only another shot, but a better shot. We've been working on the figures for the past few months, and they look good. Craw Kickstarter 2.0 won't be a slam dunk, but I hope and believe that it will feel more like a free-throw attempt than the half-court desperation shot that was the first campaign. If we succeed, the Craw box set will become part of a beautiful, boundless catalog of avant-garde music, encompassing artists as diverse as John Butcher and Shilpa Ray, Chicago Underground Duo and the USA Is a Monster, as well as those who are closer to home and, in some cases, personal friends and collaborators: Seaven Teares, Zs, Aa. Much like Craw were, Northern Spy is bigger than genre. Way bigger.

Also on board this time around, handling design and a custom liner-notes booklet, is Aqualamb. Owners Johnathan Swafford, a former resident of Craw's birthplace of Cleveland, and Eric Palmerlee are musicians and artists with strong ideas about the value of packaging and presentation. Their business is dignifying the music they release with gorgeous 100-page softbound books—not booklets, actual books. I know they will make the Craw box look and feel so much richer than it would have otherwise.

And then there is the music itself. I've been at this a long time—"this" meaning loving music and spreading the word however I can. Craw's music is simply on another plane for me. As any reader of this blog will understand, I love all kinds of music, in all kinds of ways. And generally, I have no interest in quantifying that love. But this is a special case: I've loved Craw's music for longer, and with more intensity, than any other music. Sure, the fact that Craw are an impossibly obscure band feeds into my vehemence, but I don't love this music because it's obscure. I love it because it's eerie, mesmerizing and shockingly intense, because it's as heavy as any music I've ever heard, but in totally counterintuitive ways. I love it because it's sinister yet sad, unhinged yet rigorous, insanely complex yet strikingly coherent. I love it because it feels true and profound to me.

I've spent so many late nights and early mornings dreaming of the day when people would have a chance to hear what I hear in this music, working to get the details of these two campaigns right. This new effort feels more solid. With the last campaign, my heart was in the right place, which is a significant detail, but the logistics weren't in order. This time, with the help of Northern Spy, Aqualamb and my good friend and musical collaborator David McClelland—Craw guitarist, cowriter and cofounder—I'm confident that they are. This work has not been burdensome, because the music continues to bear the weight I place on it. I go back to it, year after year, and the feeling is the same.

The poster you see above advertises the first Craw show I saw, in Kansas City, MO, on April 21, 1995. It would not be an exaggeration to say that that show changed my life. After all, I'm sitting here, writing this, 20 years later. If you enjoy this blog, or any of the words I've written, or music-related content that I've produced, or music that I've made, I would be extremely grateful if you would simply take a look at the Kickstarter page when it goes live. Watch the video, read the text, get to know the campaign, see what we're trying to do, keep up with the effort on Facebook. Donate if you're interested; spread the word if you're so inclined. Your attention would mean so much to me.