This week's feature album comes from Vancouver collective Crack Cloud with their highly anticipated debut album PAIN OLYMPICS.
In PAIN OLYMPICS, Crack Cloud do not tell their listeners what to think. It is not didactic in its message, and the group clearly hold too much respect for their audience to spoon-feed them a pedagogy. Instead, while it paints a picture of a divided world at an anxious juncture, what it offers in response, and as resistance, is hope, pure and simple.
While Crack Cloud are clearly not shy to bear the scars of their personal history, this album is a fundamentally forwards-looking one and offers an exciting portrait of a band in a moment of metamorphosis. Musically, the group have taken much of the post-punk and no wave influences that informed their eponymous 2018 compilation of EPs, and totally reinvented them through a sonic kaleidoscope of hip-hop, musical theatre, dance music and downright pop which allows them to explore a vast panoply of different emotional states. Across the album’s eight songs, the group cover a lot of ground, exploring everything from jittery punk funk à la James Chance, on ‘Ouster Stew’ and ‘Tunnel Vision’ to saxophone- infused Eastern ragas on ‘Bastard Basket.’
PAIN OLYMPICS is out via Meat Machine. If you're a PBS member, tune in this week for a chance to win a copy. Not a member? Join up today!
TOP TRACKS WE'RE LOVING
DRMNGNOW - 'Never Defeated prod. Dizz1'
Danielle Ponder & Karate Boogaloo - 'Looking Around'
Dominik Eulberg - 'Eintagsfliege (Donato Dozzy Remix)'
Moondog - 'At The End Of This All'
Nice Girl - 'Monde De La'
Vanessa Worm - 'Tiny Revolutions'
Hifiklub + Matt Cameron + Daffodil + Reuben Lewis - 'Rapture Side B'
Suzie Stapleton - 'We Are The Plague'
METZ - 'A Boat To Drown In'