The Duo Deliver A Fearlessly Oddball Debut That Breaks Rules While Making Its Own
I’m attracted to the bizarre. Things that defy convention, subvert normality. That shit is exciting. When I pressed play on All Better, the opening track of Crow Baby’s debut album Get Yourself Together (a title that, as you come to find, is wonderfully ironic), I figured I was in for another indie craft project that smells like cold brew, mustard yellow sweaters, and Observatory. So imagine my surprise, and sheer delight, when about 2 minutes in it all unravelled into beautiful chaos.
Get Yourself Together plot twists its songs into melodic dissonance, distortion, and syncopation. This may sound quite disconcerting – for a moment I could swear that I was hearing voices in my kitchen as I sat on my bed taking this album in – but Crow Baby snap all the elements back together and fasten them with tight hooks and earworm melodies. Discomfort is the modus operandi here, and it’s effective AF.
Crow Baby don’t just adopt the riot girl tradition, they pick its insides out. They twist its guts with surf rock on Little Mug and Run!, and even ethnotronica on Bless The Idea. The result is a compellingly left of centre art-pop record that answers the question, “what if Hole made a Björk album?“. At times exquisitely grotesque, at others irrelevantly vaudevillian, Get Yourself Together grounds itself in a femininity that exudes as much power as it does quirk. Bend Me, another sort-of-surf-rock track, literally melts into a puddle of electronic goo beneath a spoken word chorus, monstrous and seductive.
It’s an experiment in noise making that sees Crow Baby murder the rules and establish new ones all of their own. Get Yourself Together is perhaps one of the most unique albums I have heard this year. As a debut, it’s deliciously bold and daringly weird, meeting its ambitions without fully crashing out. It’s a body of work that screams its point of view from the onset, a fearlessly oddball pastiche that has left me shivering in anticipation for whatever Crow Baby murders next.
