The Crookes – Chasing After Ghosts (Fierce Panda)
4/5
By: Chris Jones
Chasing After Ghosts – The Crookes’ long awaited debut album, released on Fierce Panda – is frankly something of an indie pop gem. The guys responsible for it met studying English Literature at University in Sheffield, and the intellectualism and wordiness you might expect to stem from a band indulging in such pastimes gifts the album one of its most interesting facets.
The record begins with ‘Godless Girl’, probably the most unique track of the whole lot, with crooning vocals from George Waite that echo in what seems to be an ode to this atheist femme who, like the band, is lost somewhere in the times (the track’s name is actually taken from a story in a 1930s American newspaper).
Throughout Chasing After Ghosts there’s plenty of plaintive jangle in both the guitar and the lyrics to complement the pop fused riffs with which The Crookes paint their baroque poetry of youth; loves and losses, backstreet antics and romance. ‘Just Like Dreamers’ is a warbling declaration of a man leaving, complete with rousing guitar lead that conjures up vivid memories of The Smiths. The comparisons don’t stop there, and haven’t always been complimentary either – The Crookes have been called a ‘soft-core Libertines’, likely because of their poetic lyrical address and the idiosyncratic guitars, ‘The Crookes Laundry Murders, 1922’ is an example of which that also cites the antics of some real-life rascals of days gone by.
So large is The Crookes’ fixation with being young that they dedicate a track to it - ‘Youth’ is a woebegone realisation that adolescence won’t last forever, “In time, I’ll grow to find, that all we’ll ever have, are blissful moments quickly pass, it’s obscene they’re so few and far between.” The guitars take over after the chorus and cry, breaking your heart with a ringing solitude that at the end of the song left me sitting there stunned.
But then ‘I Remember Moonlight’ smashes in with a romantic preoccupation that rekindles memories of a past love affair and touches on time being a huge factor in whether relationships work or fall apart – a very relatable sentiment. There’s another interesting musing on youth in ‘Carnabetian Charms’, where Waite sings about the charm of a Carnaby Street dandy, “He’ll piss all his earnings on decadent yearnings, for Es and whizz, he’s a man about town,” for me it begins to call to mind Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, focusing on decadence, style and the youth as all important; “Bright glamour is uncouth when you’re old.”
The Crookes’ music is clearly informed by literature and is all the more poetic for it. They’re making indie-pop, a congested genre, but they’re telling stories in a manner more engaging than I’ve heard for a while, and crafting riffs that range from the catchy to the inspired. Chasing After Ghosts is a stirring indie-pop heartbreaker of an album that charms with stories that will leave many young intellectuals enamoured. Speaking of young intellectuals, the band produce a quarterly fanzine called Bright Young Things which contains drawings, lyrics, poems, recipes, photos, dirty jokes and more all selected by the band – have a look.
Artists in this article: The Crookes
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