Random issue: Your Sinclair #79 (July 1992) ►
◄ Project Zebra: Blessed is the mind too small for doubt
Stream: https://bfan.link/even-the-trees-know-karate
Download from: https://rottenpoetry.net/davey-macmanus/
I'm not sure what the ideal listening conditions for Even The Trees Know Karate are, but I'm listening to it after long days and specifically the first time after responding to emails about a minor work crisis, needing to unwind and be low energy for a bit. For that it seems ideal, and might be getting a lot of similar listens. No disrespect is intended if I say I could sleep to this.
This is a back in the game record that's also retrospective. If you enjoyed Square Moon (a double album which was the last thing The Crimea released about ten years ago) then I wouldn't say listening to it will feel all that different. If you came via The Crocketts or first Crimea album, either the self released version or the major label version, it both is and isn't the same kind of music. Davey's always used poetry as the basis of songs, but left to his own devices has a bit of an aversion to commercial pop because of being pressured into writing it and because The Crocketts spent a lot of time in self-destruct mode, something gone into in recent autobiography The Bluster Boy.
Karate is more of a forty five minute listen than sequence of individual tracks, with moments that hit different emotional beats and which at times are, dare I say, very poppy (if you consider Eels poppy then that's a fair comparison). They just aren't intended as written-for-radio singles. Many of the songs use repetition, something I usually find a bit annoying on first listens to albums but it beds in after a few runs through. Every listen brings out more snatches of adroit lyrics.
There's a lot of piano and frequent harmonica, some reverb and layering, and it's interesting choice to reprise an early track (the same one that lends its title to the book) and to use a fragment of a cover as an interlude (I'm not familiar with the original Ween song but can see why Davey likes it/them). There are moments such as certain notes of Appendix Scars that wouldn't be out of place on an ominous film soundtrack, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to settle down with a measure of your poison of choice before listening.
For me The Crimea made a huge impression with the Klutzville tracks that became the US Lottery Winners On Acid EP and with the self-released Tragedy Rocks, particularly the early versions of Bombay Sapphire Coma and Out Of Africa. I like other releases, they just aren't the ones I queue up reflexively and run through my brain like seaside rock. That isn't entirely fair, particularly to Secrets of the Witching Hour which every time I think to put it on grabs me again, but first impressions and 20 years of ingrained listening are what they are.
As I said earlier, Karate feels like more of a cohesive experience than collection of songs, something that Square Moon feels like it wants to give but is difficult to pull off with a run time of twice this. I really ought to revisit it, and tracks from that era that never made it onto an album.
But I think for the time being I'm going to be coming back more often to the new one.
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