This latest release from Emily Cross’s long-running solo project is an absolute stunner that beautifully marries the intensity of prime Nina Nastasia with art-damaged slowcore melancholy and further ices that wonderful cake with viscerally wild eruptions of experimentalism. Fittingly, the album’s backstory is similarly colorful and compelling, as Cross has been working as a death doula in Dorset, England (her usual collaborator/Loma bandmate Dan Duszynski remains back in Texas) and a label interested in the album’s demos encouraged her to “push her imagination to the limits.”
Cross gamely embraced that challenge and summoned an international cast of musicians for a two-week recording session in Germany. Unfortunately, the label’s enthusiasm unexpectedly dissipated and Cross was left with an uncharacteristically expensive album, disappearing collaborators, a mountain of isolated recordings, and no label, but the passions of Marcin Sulewski, Seth Manchester, and Ba Da Bing’s Ben Goldberg eventually helped shape that would-be disaster into a finished masterpiece. In fact, the transformation of these songs amusingly reminds me of the moment in The Wizard of Oz in which an already great black and white film suddenly blossomed into gloriously vivid technicolor.
The result is a hauntingly beautiful and poetic album that feels like it is in a permanent state of collapse, as Cross’s hushed and intimate songs often sound like they are happening while The Rapture unfolds, burning planes fall from the sky, and the earth rips itself open. To my ears, the album’s dazzling centerpiece is “Dorset Area of Natural Beauty,” which deceptively opens with a church organ improvisation mingled with raucous laughter before blossoming into one of the most achingly gorgeous and dreamlike songs that I have ever heard in my life. The rest of the album seesaws back and forth between melodic would-be hits like “Charred Grass” and weirdo experimentation like “Right Thing By Me,” but the unifying thread that holds everything together is an unwavering knack for brilliant arrangements, as Crush Me is an absolute feast of snarling strings, strangled feedback, collapsing beats, lush chords, unusual harmonies, and volcanic crescendos of blackened, gnarly distortion.
