It's the way that keyboard or guitar or whatever it is line that slides in queasily over the acoustic guitar intro of "Everywhere" that helps do it for me. But that's just the start.
Cranes' second full album was one of the albums for me, and for a lot of other people, that year, 1993. It even spawned a radio hit, a remix of the hooky-almost-in-spite-of-itself "Jewel" by Robert Smith, which admittedly had a lot of Robert Smith guitar all over it and a new drum pattern, so call it more a collaboration if you like. Point being, love this album love it love it love it. At least I did.
Things were more dramatic on the one hand, more beautifully restrained, artistic if you like, neo-classical if you must, on the other. I mean, "Cloudless" alone. The way that the carefully produced/plucked guitar line or is it something else is wrapped around with a gentle synth string melody and a soft electric guitar chime, sheer beauty in such a small space, Alison Shaw's on-the-verge-of-interpretation vocals sounding lost and alone in a strange dream, and then at the end the steady, careful drumming lurking in the background. Most things rarely end up even the slightest bit close to this in music, where everything is just just just right.
And if you want drama, as mentioned, then consider "Adrift," the lead-off single, and still one of the spookiest songs I've heard. The way the piano figure starts everything off is nicely strange enough, but then the lyrics all of a sudden start making a weird, terrible sense, lost in some starry-skied area where you suddenly realize that there's really nothing above you, say, and you are beyond insignificant. Let the music build, let your unease grow, then it all crunches through the gentle strings providing an attempt at comfort, and that neat trick of rock as tribal ritual reappears -- and a damn fine one it is, right down to the final end loop wailing like some forlorn signal somewhere, about to be smothered at last. Not that the similar scrapes of weird guitar in "Clear" provide much in the way of comfort, you understand.
But in the end it ends not with a bang nor a whimper, just a slow final unfolding, "And Ever" and its downward drift easing into "Golden," the most delicate of guitar rings, the most minimal of strings, the most restrained of vocals, and nothing more, until "Rainbows" brings it all to a stop, a slowed down afterecho of "Everywhere," even more quietly grinding. A blasted emptiness of a record from a time when lots of pretenders to that throne tried and missed the point entirely.
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