| Illinois Entertainer - Tales From the Darkside |
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Post-show, most musicians receive the obligatory high-fives or slaps on
the back from various well-wishers and new fans. The Great Crusades'
lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Brian Krumm, however, gets a different
reaction. "People come up to me and say 'Are you O.K. man?' Is
everything alright?" Listening to The Great Crusades' debut album The First Spilled Drink of the Evening (Mud), you realize that such a response is totally understandable. Krumm depists images of boozy nightlife on the album's 12 cuts. Songs like "Beautiful Drunk" are buoyed by driving guitars and a surging rhythm section that show way more life than the passed-out person depicted in the Kyrics: "The room started spinning; my face hit the floor/You stepped over me, then went out the door." It's not surprising who the band's first drummer had in mind when he and Krumm started the band. "Two years ago, The Suede Chain (the champaign-based outfit that Krumm nad Crusades bassist used to play in) was starting to dissolve," Krumm remembers. "Abd I ran into the old Honcho Overload drummer Mike Rader and Rader said, "When am I gonna see your ass playing around Champaign again?" And he said he's like to start a vocal-driven band somewhere around the lines of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The next day I gave him a call and shortly after that we started jamming in the basement; through many different personnel changes we got Brian Hunt to play bass, got the lineup going and recorded this album. "Before I started the group, I had never listened to Nick Cave," Krumm continues. "Then I started listening to him and Tom Waits sort of heavily. I would like to believe our sound is more a combination of different influences than those guys that we've sort of been compared to before. I like songwriters like Elvis Costello and Paul Simon, who, when you listen to their songs, you hear not onnnly melodies but good stories too." Krumm's songs on First Spilled Drink suck you in like dimestore novels. You want to know the full story behind the long-distance romance depicted in "Beautiful Drunk" ; spanish flavorded guitar captures the weirdness of the one-nighter in "The Stranger" ; and the scary pop of "Who Put a Gun in My Hand" belies the eventual tragedy of the tale. Even a sweetly portrayed tune like "Caroline" has a lengthy story behind it. Say Krum: "At work, I had made a complete fool of myself. This beautiful woman who happened to be named Caroline came in and we were talking for a while then she left and I ran out of the store and looked for her on the street and said I'd really like to go out with her sometime. she said, 'Oh that's so sweet, but I have a boyfriend.' So that day I went and sat on the porch out in front of my house and wrote it." What keeps The Crusades' music from just being a downer's delight is the thunderous music behind it. Krumm's black velvet voice fully fleshes out these tunes, and the addition of some new bandmates has only tightened the sound. Former Last Gentlemen front man Brian Leach (now also with outfits Sugarbuzz and Life on Mars) has taken over some guitar, backing vocal, and keyboard duties, while Krumm and Hunt's old grade-school classmate Christian Moder has stepped up to the plate on drums. (And How!) While all The Crusades start out the set nattily dressed in old- fashioned suits and ties, Moder expels so much energy - think Keith Moon standing up - that by the end of the show his sweat-soaked shirt flops over his dago T, his tie and jacket long since destroyed. The band is great, but Moder is the center of its power force. "Sometimes on stage I'll look over and Chris and I are digging the same groove," Hunt describes. "You don't get that sitting down." The ease with which the band interplays on stage "totally goes back to how long we've known each other," reveals Hunt. The three played together at their sixth-grade graduation party in Maryville, IL (after some cajoling the name of that band is revelaed: Extortion!) So how do these small-town boys, via Maryville, Champaign and Los Angeles make music that sounds stright from a gin-soaked urban landscape? It's Moder who has the answer: "Maybe when you come from a smaller community like we did, stimulus is seeing stuff you're not used to seeing, as opposed to growing up in New York City where maybe you'de be more interested in a smaller setting." Hunt adds, "There are more resources in Chicago, more places to play. Arguably, there's more stimuli, more influences to draw on creatively." Which explains the band's recent relocation to the Windy City, where things have been moving right along. The live gigs they've played here have been pretty successful so far. "Our music really sets a mood," Hunt enthuses. "I don't think we're a band that people are going to be slam dancing to. I think we sort of blow people back a little bit. It's not unusual at one of our shows to have everybody just sitting around a table with a candle, having a cocktail." Moder: "It's a cool cabaret vide."_And not one to be missed. You'll most likely be too rocked to waste much time worrying about the band's psyche afterward. more press |
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