Canadian art collective Crack Cloud have always made it clear that, for them, creativity is the vehicle for catharsis, but perhaps never more explicitly than with their latest release ‘The Medium’; taken from their upcoming third album ‘Red Mile’ due July 26th via Jagjaguwar.
When getting to know Crack Cloud, you get the impression that with every release they get one step closer to enlightenment, finding new methods of relief and broadening their perspective bit by bit. ‘The Medium’ is a dissection of the medium itself, in some ways an appreciation of the essential escape and community music provides, whilst in other ways an acknowledgement of how that can be exploited, it finds happiness in silliness and contentment in spite of misfortune.
Crack Cloud chat to us about the new album ‘Red Mile’ inside Issue Fifty. Pick up a copy here.
With ‘The Medium’, Crack Cloud look at the way music and its subsequent subcultures become coping mechanisms, they sing, “You go out to a show and you sing along, it’s somewhere to belong, you find your place”. The dream-sequence-esque music video follows pop fans and punk fans who have adopted the stereotypical calling cards of their favourite genres, with one leather jacket scrawled with the slogan “The meaning of meaning is meaning!”. It seems we’re being shown how easy it is for people to dedicate themselves to certain media for the sake of belonging to something – for the sake of meaning. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, until they expand with lines such as “catchy platitudes for the restless mind […] who could have thought that the socially reclusive could be exploited for industry usage”. They comment on how music and its dedicated followers can be co-opted and tainted for the sake of the industry’s financial gain – a conversation they started previously with tracks such as ‘Virtuous Industry’ – ‘The Medium’ is both musically and lyrically a ridding of frustration.
In a recently issued statement, Zach Choy (drummer and frontman) explained that Red Mile follows “the externalisation of Crack Cloud’s mythology, displaced and dismantled as we’ve grown out of ourselves, constantly, creatively reborn, by virtue and design”. As we near a decade since Crack Cloud’s beginning, it’s clear to see that who they are today is a distant descendant of what they once were, distant in everything other than fervour.
Photo by Megan-Magdalena Bourne
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