So I said Portishead was about the only good goth band of the nineties. Make that two.
Whereas Portishead revamped/remade/remodeled lots of different things into a very nineties brew, Cranes (also from the west of England near the coast…I smell conspiracy, though admittedly Cranes hailed from the Devon area rather than Bristol and its environs) were a little more traditional all around. Album and singles sleeves with cropped hymnal pages and old print designs and statuary and pressed leaves and flowers, for one, and you could never fault the design sense. If, again, you were me.
Cranes were also much more of a 'rock' band -- yer guitars, bass, drums, singer. Advantageously, they never sounded much like a rock band, and the use of keyboards for mood and shading was duly chilling, as on "Living and Breathing," where a practically subharmonic bass line meshed with minimal piano notes, as just the right amount of string synth floated behind the scraping guitar. And then, of course, Alison Shaw's vocals.
If there was one thing which people couldn't ignore or agree on about the band, it was the fact that like Liz Fraser, say, you either worship what Alison Shaw does or you think she's an overly precious annoyance. No points for guessing where I fall on that, but I'll grant a specific point, in that I can't begin to tell what she's singing about most of the time. But unlike Liz's Cocteau adventures, Alison relies on careful mannerism, everything just so, while singing high enough and just unclearly enough that you are forced to scramble for metaphors. Little girls lost? Emotional trauma? Something much more prosaic than any of that? Design yer desired interpretation and run with it, and let the scraps that do come through feed the fires of argument rather than settle them any.
As for the music, space, restraint, crunching in when need be while not sounding anything like the Pixies or Nirvana -- little surprise that Cranes opened for or played with bands like Slowdive, the Young Gods and the Cure. Each in their own way all rely on the same sense of deploying atmospherics in arrangement. Given the prominence of both minimal string arrangements and piano in their songs thanks to drummer Jim Shaw, who plays percussion as carefully and deliberately as well, comparisons sometimes were bandied about to Michael Nyman on quieter fare like "Watersong" or the gentle and yes, quite beautiful "Tomorrow's Tears," but then something like "Starblood" kicks in, with drums that can only really be described as ritualistic and guitar crunches that slide down and down and down again while Alison almost cries above the tumult, and then…Einsturzende, maybe? I can buy that, in a removed, elegant, different sort of way.
"Adoration" made for a perfect album ender as well, the way it just grew and grew, more involved, more powerful, more of a rising up and out. I seem to recall any number of 'locked in the cellar' descriptions of the band around that time; if so, then Cranes here turned the tables by invoking rather more of a majestic dreamworld instead. Something Eddison might have liked, or Dunsany…or alternately, Peake. Perhaps all the more appropriately.