Review: Cru Jones “The Conversation” CD

If you ask me, any band that names themselves after the main character from the greatest movie of all time ("Rad". 1986. If you don't love it, I hate you.) should really rock and totally kick ass. Well, I wouldn't go that far with these guys, but it's not bad. In fact, I'd probably be pretty into it were it not for the fact that the singing sounds really strained and forced. I can live with it, of course, but I like the music a lot more than the vocals. It's basically heavy emo/indie rock kind of stuff that tends to be moderately paced and uses a variety of styles from melodic yet heavy chord progressions to layered note-based riffing with creative picking patterns that has more of a metal sort of tinge to it, even though none of this stuff is all that aggressive. It's a little typical against a lot of what's been gaining popularity out there in recent times, but these guys are definitely a bit more complex with their riffing than a lot of these bands, so it's not just stripped down catchy stuff or anything at all, and the performances are pretty damn tight, which is always a plus. "Love: A Roadside View" is among the punchier songs and therefore it breaks out as more memorable than most of the others, which carries over into the similar "Eyes Wide Fist Tight" and "Fletch Versus Foley" - making for the strongest back-to-back run of the entire disc. "Our Last Effort to Save You" opens more mildly with nice clean guitars and such, contrasted with thick midpaced chords and post-hardcore textures in the distance, and I think that stuff's pretty nice as well. Though they don't fall back on generic uses of clean guitars as lighter atmospheres, those passages do tend to work really well on this record. "Only Great War" tops seven minutes and definitely drags on a bit with some typical pull-off runs and an unnecessary outro consisting of a minute or so of samples of a crowded room or something - which kind of deadens the blow leading into the aptly titled "Hit the Deck", bringing back some of the rocked out catchiness present earlier on in the record. The recording's not bad, but the vocals are mixed a little too loud as well, which of course emphasizes the intricacies of the singing that I'm not very fond of... but what can you do? Most everything else sounds pretty good. The drums are solid, the guitars are pretty crisp and possess a little more chunkiness than much of this general style, and so on. Some of the guitar panning thins things out just a touch, and the bass gets lost oftentimes, but for the most part the production sounds nice and needs only minimal tweaking. Visually this one's nice and consistent, with all of the artwork illustrated on cardboard and clean, simple text over top for the lyrics. The content is seemingly all personal and kind of comes across like abstract narratives: "The truth tries to break through but you won't let her out of your heart long enough to see, She's in it for her, you're playing for keeps, So light a torch or better yet your hand on fire and guide us through this one night stance..." All in all this is actually a good disc, I just really think those vocals hold back the music. Was the singing a little more emphatic (there aren't really many vocal harmonies or backups at all) rather than having that kind of drawn out overdramatic edge to it this would definitely be a stronger effort. I'll hope for the best with their next outing, as these songs are pretty cool otherwise.