Cranes
Population Four
(Dedicated)
It must be gratifying for a goth-rock act to have their latest release touted as "scariest of the year," and this is certainly the sort of regard that Population Four earns. Even if it is of the latter-day, black-velvet-and-roses cut of goth, where there's more finery and fewer severed heads -- dinner goth, if you will, and you must. Cranes -- no "the," thank you -- are an English quartet who've been doling out this sort of scare since '91, however imitative it may be. But here we turn from the usual array of flying-buttresses-on-a-decrepit-cathedral praise for the genre -- the general evocation of egocentric despair and gloomy-to-harsh instrumentals, territory better navigated by that other, better, now defunct bird-named act -- and point out the inadvertent way in which Cranes have always excelled: Alison Shaw's vocals. Old press clips downplay its quality by describing it as a "babyish voice" or a "pre-pubescent vocal lilt" or "the character of a child trapped in the body of an adult." But listen, we're not dealing with anything so cutesy-poo. Instead, Shaw must be some sort of elf. And not a cheerful toy-building Christmas elf, nor a Keebler cookie elf, nor even a stalwart, sword-slinging Dungeons & Dragons dork-out elf -- no, I'm thinking of the sort of leering, pointy-eared creature you might, on some bleary Sunday morning while venturing outside for the paper, discover molesting your lawn gnomes. The kind of annoying house sprite that toothless serfs used to placate by dropping cat hair in the butter churn, or some such. The type of tiny, hypersonic dental-drill troll that Norwegians would shoo away from the gravlax. Shaw's simply cannot be a human voice -- child, midget, conjoined twin, or otherwise. And if it's the product of studio manipulation, it could be used more effectively in a voice-over for some pedophilic version of a Grimm's tale. Listening to Population Four creates the overwhelming desire to commit superstition -- only most of us these days don't have butter churns, even if our apartments are chock-full of cat hair. The horror. The horror.
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