CROWS “Severance” review

Oh sure, you’ve all probably just seen Dublin plastered all over your TV screens lately what with recent visits from the Queen of England and Barack Obama (both of which, I might add, made getting in and out of the society for work a fucking “Escape from New York” style ordeal). You’ve probably seen the media try and use these events to paint us as a country recovering from a harrowing recession,  a prosperous future just around our corner, a welcoming tourist friendly nation full of rainbows and sunbeams reascending the peaks of its’ former glories to take our seat at the table of wealthy. You probably saw these figureheads being chauffered from government buildings through crowds of cheering onlookers to their gala ball or VIP tour of the Guiness factory.

Well that’s not the Dublin I live in. I live in an apartment in a shitty suburban housing estate that was never finished properly because the money ran out when the banks fucked up. There’s a couple of supermarkets, a bunch of other empty/abandoned housing developments,a school, a motorway, and that’s about it. There’s an empty park at the end of my road which is regularly full of trashed beer bottles and cans every weekend. Walls are covered with graffiti, building sites are raided for bonfire pallets on an almost weekly basis, fences and gates get trashed on a daily basis. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not a particularly rough neighborhood or anything that I live in. But’s it a depressing  concrete-lined straightjacket of a place that breeds boredom and frustration in kids that live here, and that boredom finds its’ way out via petty vandalism and escapism. There are enough similar places in my city that I can tell you this is what Dublin really is: it’s not a thriving metropolis full of creativity and joy – it’s a network of grey skied suburbs arranged around a road to nowhere. Like hundreds of other cities in hundreds of other countries.

And this is the Dublin that Crows come from.

“Severance”, their recently release tape, is the sound of a bunch of  kids who are fed up with everything around them. It’s not even in the lyrics (though those are pretty pissed), it’s in the delivery and in the music. There’s a tangible sense of frustration that runs through the songs. It’s basically very, very angry but it’s the sound of anger that’s been turned in on the self out of not knowing what else to do. And as we all know, when that kind of bottled up anger gets to a point it eventually explodes. In this case Crows explode at their surroundings, their peer group and the listener in a burst of catharsis that almost knocks your head clean off.

Recently expanded to a five piece with the addition of a second guitarist, Crows have come a long way in a short time. They made some early demos in 2010 which were very much the sound of a bunch of young lads playing what they felt they should play to be part of the local scene. Luckily they quickly realised this was the worst thing they could do, and took the time to work on making the sound coming out of their instruments closer to the sound in their heads – bringing a little more of the heaviness and brutality of the early grindcore bands out more, adding a little more speed, and crucially letting vocalist Andrew spill his guts out no holds barred as he dissects his unhappiness with his surroundings. his scene (the band have caught a degree of shit from some locals for their suggestion that, y’know, maybe the hardcore scene isn’t quite the amazing positive force we all pretend it is) and himself.

CROWS “Subculture.Self Hatred.Sodomy”