INTERVIEW: Miserable bastards come out into the sunshine - The Crawling in the daylight...

THE adjective 'happy' is not one you could apply to the music of The Crawling. Denizens of the darker reaches of humanity, a place where doom sounds cheerful in comparison to the palette of dread and death they paint from...

So what do the miserable trio do when faced with the prospect of sunshine, bright days and everyone smiling with "taps aff", barbecues, and cold beers...Andy Clarke offers one answer..

"Summer plans? We just want to hide until the dark winter months!"

Nah - they are on a mission to bring the night into the day. Last year they stormed the Hobgoblin Stage at Bloodstock, conjuring creative gloom amidst the Derbyshire summer. That performance was the springboard to launch their critically acclaimed album 'Anatomy of Loss' (review here) and earn them key 2017 dates.

"Actually the summer has turned out even better than we hoped," said Clarke. "Next up when have the honour of playing METAL DAYS in Slovenia, which is just unreal.

"This is our 3rd large European festival, and we are super excited about it!"

If you are in Slovenia perchance they play on Monday 24th July – 16:15 on the Boško Bursać Stage.

Never missing a chance to bring wretchedness to the happy people, The Crawling are off again to Tubby's Farm in Hillsborough...

"We’ll only be back from Metal Days, and then we hit Sunflowerfest in Northern Ireland for the second year in a row," said Clarke.

In an unusually upbeat comment he said: "It’s a really cool weekend of music, arts, crafts, fine food, camping, and of course – beer: lots of it! We are thrilled to be invited back, and it’s great to see more metal bands this year as we share the stage with Zlatanera, Cursed Sun and heavy metal tyrants Stormzone!"

With that out of the way The Crawling will be preaching despair over the country.

"August sees our first trip over to mainland UK since Bloodstock 2016, as we accompany Strangle Wire playing Wales and London; it is guaranteed to be a heavy weekend."

Heavy? The Large Hadron Collider in Cern would collapse under such heaviness...

And, in case you are feeling chirpy this July have this slice of anti-cheerful slice of 'The Right To Crawl'

ALBUM REVIWEW: Elegy to agonies on Anatomy of Loss from The Crawling

THE agonies of life, the pain of loss, the morose mundane existence of 21st Century life - yes The Crawling haven't released a happy clappy début album full of soaring choruses and posed pretentiousness with 'Anatomy of Loss'.

It is sourced from living in a bleak commuter town pretending to be a city; concrete corrosiveness and a stark pretentious populace blithely living in a bubble of hyper-normalisation, consumerism, avoiding reality lest it intrude on their narcissistic lives.

Andy, Stuart and Gary have produced an album ridden with pain, as they say on 'Poison Orange' the sense of "drowning in horror" pervades each tortured note.

If there is hope to be taken from this album, it is only the almost cathartic realisation that others share your loathing for what passes as civilisation.

Musically doom, sludge and bleak metal have been absorbed into a sensibility where the despair on "Acid On My Skin" is the most 'cheerful' sounding track, with its terror and chorus about tearing out ones own eyes.

However, while there is a monochrome level within the subject matter there is a three-dimensional element to each track. The careful use of repetitious riffage is matched by subtle changes of mood, with Gary's measured deployment of fills rather than trying to overwhelm each track, such as when after a minute of 'The Right To Crawl' the speed moves from up a little, emphasising the full-tilt lyrical rant.

On the same track Andy and Stuart pick out with delicacy the space for the listener to briefly surface, gulp a mouthful of oxygen before returning to the ocean of bile.

This is not an album to sit lightly and play in the background; this is an album to, like that ocean of bile, to immerse yourself in; wallow in its fear and anger.

Anger is probably the best way to characterise the feeling as you contemplate the words. It is a brooding anger that loathes itself as it lashes out at a putrid world. For every careful note chosen there is a sense of hatred, a resonance of personal distrust and an elegy to agonies thrust upon the individual.

There are no brief interludes as each song is given the right length, with the shortest song, 'All Our Failings' just shy of four and a half minutes.

What it does mean is that on the likes of 'Violence Vanity and Neglect' the timing is such that it is the metal equivalent of Tantric Sex - delaying the climactic musical moment to ensure each feeling is savoured like barbed wire drawn across taut skin.

Closer 'Catatonic' caresses the inner fears with a depth and development of the song such as to take loss and yearn for a return that is never possible. Like all songs on this release the arrangement and the pacing match the lyrics and music perfectly.

It is unfair to pick a 'best' track from an album such a 'Anatomy of Loss' as all stand true to themselves, each of the seven songs to be experienced as one idea. The art and craft of writing albums has not been lost on The Crawling.

Long may their misery master over our aural needs.

Review by Jonathan Traynor

Anatomy of Loss will be officially launched on Saturday, April 8th in Limelight2, with support from Valpurga and Shourded.