Crooked Fingers sing purdy

This is it, children. This is the last proper elpee I’ll write about for 2011, AND I’M, LIKE, TWO (2!) MONTHS LATE ON IT cuz it came out back around Halloween time (or earlier?) because I was writing about other stuff (like that shitty Spits record) and doing other things. You know what tho? “Breaks In The Armour” by Crooked Fingers is THE RECORD THAT WOULDN’T LEAVE ME ALONE. Seriously. I’ve been listening to it since it came out, meant to cover it, but kept going with other things. This has happened before with me and Eric Bachmann.

I didn’t like “Icky Mettle” much when it came out. It’s true.

I had a phone friend at Alias Records in the early nineties and we would talk about bands every so often. One day, she called all wound up about a band the label had signed named Archers Of Loaf. She told me I would love them, that I was one of the first people she knew she had to call. About six months later, she sent me a copy of “Icky Mettle” and I was not very excited about it. If I remember correctly, this was in 1994, and I was pretty much on a steady diet sheer noise from The Cows, Ministry, and The Jesus Lizard. For some reason AT THAT TIME, I wasn’t getting what Archers Of Loaf were going for, and I really disappointed my friend at Alias. I was still gonna program the music video they’d shot for “Web In Front”, but I remember very clearly how bothered she was by how tone deaf I was to this project that she was so invested in.

That was a very long time ago. Bachmann has been performing Crooked Fingers songs for sometime now (“Breaks In The Armor” is the third elpee, I think?) and if yer familiar with Archers, you’ll hear Archers in Fingers, not so much in Bachmann’s voice (he’s polished it up to match the hymnal-qualities of CF harmonies) but in the odd, random discordant accents Bachmann strategically tucks into the far corners of his songs. However, it’s Bachmann’s voice and his remarkably melodious song assembly that are the main attractions on “Breaks In The Armour”. These tracks do more than hold up to repeated listening, yer own mind will repeat them in yer head, and you’ll be helpless to do anything about it. Yes, I kept skipping over this fine elpee to write about other elpeez, but I was listening to ‘Breaks In The Armour” the entire time because I COULD NOT HELP MYSELF. Listen to “The Counterfeiter”, with its elastic basslines, solid beat, Bachmann’s passionate singing, and the perfectly-placed minimalist piano notes toward the end of the track, and you’ll find yerself humming the tune days later. That can be said of just about all of the tracks contained within “Breaks In The Armour”. It’s a very good record.

So eventually, I had to tell my friend at Alias that she was right all along about Archers, because “Vee Vee” floored me in 1995. “Harnessed In Slums” was one of my favorite things in one of my favorite years ever, and is a track I still cue up on a regular basis. “Vee Vee” was the record that helped me to understand “Icky Mettle”. To this day, I don’t know how that record initially just sailed through my head without sticking at all, but that little mystery is one of the main reasons why I’m (CLEARLY) so obsessed with music… I really don’t always understand my own responses to it, let alone other people. It’s endlessly fascinating.

I still don’t have my Top Ten Elpeez set in cement yet (I still have a week to obsess and procrastinate) and although this one probably won’t make the top ten of my list, I would certainly count it somewhere in the second set of ten. First, though, I’ve gotta get my Top Ten Trax list finalized. Finally. Look for that next week.