Cranebuilders - Your Song

  by Gary Wollen

published: 7 / 4 / 2003

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Review

Cranebuilders are a five piece who share a terrace house just like the Beatles, Monkees etc. They met while working at the Merseyside music store Cranes, whose name they snatched for their own and whose floor space they utilised as a rehearsal area for their still embryonic band. When the shop ceased to trade the band started recording demos in earnest and the resultant cassettes started doing the usual rounds of promoters, fanzines, and A and R men. Their first release was an EP called ‘Bitch’ and was put out on the band’s own Ten People Tell label. It found willing converts in the form of Steve Lamacq and John Peel. Cranebuilders sound is totally majestic but in a tender humble kind of way. Theirs is the sound of hope, expectation, and angst. Their melodies are heartwrenching and their tunes truly uplifting, but are often tinged, sometimes immersed and occasionally haunted by a dark, tense melancholy. Theirs is a brooding menace, a desperately personal reflection on a time where self-interest and gratification are the new gods, and community and reaching out to an audience appears to be forgotten values. Bands that all too often claim to be preserving this particular spirit are already by and large beyond the reaches of the masses and, by thus doing so, are merely paying a superficial 'lip service’ to the cause. They are packaged and marketed to the point where solace and empathy and indeed personification of the self are, to all intents and purposes, a facile empty gesture. Here though is a shining light. This EP celebrates the obscure, almost shadowy, splendour of music. It achieves the enviable distinction of being able to straddle the gap between the murky, unlit joy of bohemia and pure uplifting pop in very much the way that the Velvets or Smog do. It’s not that Cranebuilders lift from these bands directly. It’s more that they follow the same template cut from the same cloth. Once the cloth is cut is when Cranebuilders set about the dressing of their songs with a wonderful texture of light and shade. These are four songs that need to be heard to be believed. As the chorus of you’re song proclaims, “ It feels like heaven is right before my eyes.”

Track Listing:-

1 You're Song
2 Morning Cup
3 Now I Hear You
4 Public Space