Few people would call Brian Crook’s voice beautiful. It’s a reedy, nasal tenor that resonates and rousts about in the broad spaces of his Kiwi South Islander’s accent. Nearly a decade ago, Crook and his wife Maryrose (the multi-talented duo that has constituted the heart of the Renderers since 1989) moved from their earthquake-wrecked New Zealand home and settled in the American southwest. Over that time his voice has acquired additional textures, scuffed and shaped by dusty plateaus and desert winds. It has crags and caverns. It’s not lovely, but it has a haggard glory. When it’s paired with his singular, by turns delicate and volatile work on the electric guitar, it issues in music of remarkable force and affective range. All of those qualities are amply present on This World Just…
…Eats Me Up Alive, his excellent new LP.
This is the first music to come out of the Renderers’ camp since 2016’s In the Sodium Light. That was a spare record, languid and often pretty grim. Crook’s new songs share the mood of In the Sodium Light, but the sonic palette is wider. “Dragged Both Ways” evokes the stormy passion of earlier Renderers records. Crook’s playing is all shooting sparks and solar flares, driving the song into territories wild and grand. In “The Smoking Singularity,” cascades of notes squelch and belch queasily while waves of amp distortion slowly flatline. “J. C. Oates” is a paean to the famous author, capturing the weirding threat of her best fiction, like Wonderland or “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” The song itself threatens to collapse into desiccated disarray at every moment. Crook sings, “The brackish lake with swan-head boats / The outlaw girls, they sneered and spoke / In their brutal insinuation / Prone and strange in isolation.” It’s a creepy performance, suffused with incipient violence.
The record’s best songs mobilize and intertwine all of those elements. “Black Mariah” foregrounds a lot of drone and squall, but the song also incorporates Crook’s gentle, moody picking. The tonal interplay is tense, and the resulting atmosphere can give you goosebumps. Maryrose Crook’s voice lends the song an additional wisp of mournful gorgeousness. “Eats Me Up Alive” has a similar compositional logic, but it builds to more alarming intensities. Brushed drums and cymbals shuffle alongside a distant organ, and Crook’s guitar shimmers and whines. The song’s last three minutes are dominated by harrowing noise, an inevitable outcome of the accumulation of bad feeling and explosive playing. It reaches toward catharsis.
It doesn’t quite get there. None of the songs on This World Just Eats Me Up Alive can entirely shake the weight of bad news and bummer sentiments. During the eight years it took to write and record these songs, Crook lost a home and, more tragically, a beloved brother. Those experiences have left indelible marks that can be sensed in his playing, singing and writing. To be sure, the Renderers have never made unambiguously happy records. Still, longtime listeners of the band know that there’s a special kind of magic that happens when the Crooks play and sing together. Like Richard and Linda Thompson in the early 1970s, the Crooks make music that purposefully charts a path through sadness and hurt in order to chase transcendence. On this mostly solo record, Brian Crook doesn’t duck or deviate from those rigors. That’s a good thing, because This World Just Eats Me Up Alive is a terrific record, full of fearless songs and fierce feeling. — dusted