Crack Cloud: Red Mile review – aggressively tuneful rock about life’s big questions

(Jagjaguwar)
The Canadian indie-garage-rockers take the mickey out of pop, punk and the stories we tell ourselves, but strong feeling outweighs the cynicism

Trite metaphors, tortured similes and outright cliches are, ahem, ten a penny in today’s pop lyrics – so how refreshing to have Zach Choy, bandleader with Canadian indie curveballs Crack Cloud, writing with such wit, bite and the kind of perfectly scanning rhyme you get in the best sea shanties or children’s literature. That isn’t faint praise: it’s deceptively hard to write lyrics this rhythmic, this rounded, much less so while making trenchant comments about the very capabilities of art.

Crack Cloud have had a shifting lineup over the past decade and two previous albums, and the band match Choy’s ambition, playing a singular kind of maximalist garage rock decked out with synths, saxophones, strings and singalongs. Yet he remains at its centre, a drummer-singer with a history of addiction. “Road to recovery, an early talking point,” he notes drily of the press (including the Guardian) who latched on to this traumatic story when the band broke through around 2017, and Choy is so aware of how personal narrative and pop culture are constructed.