| News Gazette - Champaign, IL |
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CHAMPAIGN - Brian Krumm likes lyrics he can understand.
"Lyrically speaking, I get into those lyricists who put things in concrete
terms. Sometimes in rock songs, you have no idea what the lyrics mean
because they are so full of symbols and mysterious terms that seem to
have no meaning. You would have to have been there when the
songrwriter was actually writing the song to know what he was talking
about," says Krumm, the lead singer and songwriter for the Great
Crusades. That's where Krumm takes his cue: The songs on The Great Crusades' new album, "The First Spilled Drink of the Evening" (on Urbana's Mud Records and produced by Adam Schmitt) are straight and to the point. No mysterious wordplay, obtuse symbolism or metaphors that make no sense here. "I have more admiration for guys like Paul Simon and Elvis Costello, guys who are straightforward in their lyrics. I would much rather hear a story than a bunch of words strung together that have no apprarent meaning," adds Krumm. This is stuff that would make Tom Waits proud: smoky, moody songs with a dark edge. That's no surprise since Waits and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds served as jumping off points when Krumm was writing songs for the new album. Krumm's voice is deep, throaty, slightly menacing at times. But it is a voice that can change. Being the lead singer and primary songwriter are new roles for Krumm, who was member of the highly regarding Suede Chain, until it broke up. The intitial idea was just to get a group of musicians together and see what happened. We had no preconceived notions or ideas about what we were going to sound like," Krumm says. "With the Suede Chain, I wrote songs on occasion, but with this band, for the first time in my life, I wrote a whole batch of songs," Krumm says. "There were a totally new set of influences for this band, whereas with the Suede Chain everyone had their things that they threw into the mix." Krumm, initially, had the jitters about being the front man for a band. "But once I experimented and found my own vocal style, it all seemed very natural," he adds. more press |
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