Thursday, June 29, 2017
Joe Crow - 2015 - Compulsion 12''
Dark Entries – DE-089
Compulsion opens with a person being swallowed by motion.
The front cover is washed in a pale grey-green, its central figure bent forward beneath a rush of water that seems to radiate from the body in every direction. The head is dark and lowered, almost featureless. Arms and shoulders dissolve into the spray. It is difficult to tell whether the person is swimming, collapsing, emerging from the sea or being driven back into it.
The uncertainty gives the image its power. Compulsion is not illustrated as a dramatic seizure of desire. It looks more like the exhausting physical consequence of being unable to stop.
Joe Crow’s name sits in the upper corner, its neat rounded lettering suddenly disturbed by a cluster of sharp handwritten marks. The word “compulsion” waits quietly near the bottom. Nothing is oversized. The sleeve does not advertise its rediscovery or announce the importance of the music inside. It resembles a private image retrieved from a drawer, still carrying the weather of the morning when it was taken.
The back cover completes the movement. A body lies spread across wet sand, arms and legs extended, the sea receding around it. The first image contains struggle and propulsion. The second contains surrender. Together they create a tiny narrative without explaining whether the figure has survived, chosen to lie down or simply reached the end of whatever carried them there.
This is exactly the territory occupied by the title song.
“Compulsion” is constructed from very little, but nothing in it feels unfinished. A drum machine establishes a modest, repetitive pulse. Bass and guitar move with almost embarrassed restraint. A small synthesizer figure circles through the arrangement, bright enough to resemble pop music but too lonely to offer uncomplicated pleasure.
The recording has the scale of a room rather than a studio. Every sound seems close enough to touch. There is no thick atmosphere concealing the equipment, no dramatic production transforming private thought into public spectacle. The rhythm begins, the voice enters, and the song proceeds with the uneasy concentration of somebody repeating an argument long after the other person has left.
Crow’s singing is the source of the tension. At times he sounds detached, as though reporting the emotional facts from a safe distance. A moment later the voice bends upward and becomes fragile, almost childlike. The shift is subtle, but it changes the meaning of everything around it. Control and vulnerability are not assigned to separate characters. They occur within the same throat.
The song appears simple because its elements are easy to identify. The experience is more difficult. Its melody is immediately memorable, yet the arrangement never settles into the comforting shape of a conventional pop single. The pieces circle one another without fully connecting. The drum machine keeps time, but it cannot make the emotional situation advance.
This is what makes the title so exact. Compulsion is movement that does not produce escape.
The lyric keeps returning to the difficulty of saying something clearly enough to make it final. Words are found, offered and repeated, but repetition does not repair the failure underneath them. The song’s central unease comes from the suspicion that communication itself has become part of the ritual. The speaker continues because stopping would require admitting that the answer may never arrive.
Crow does not inflate that condition into tragedy. The music remains almost dry. Its sadness is contained within small decisions: the pause before a phrase, a bass note allowed to hang slightly too long, a synthesizer melody that sounds cheerful until it returns for the fifth or sixth time.
Repetition slowly removes the color from it.
That quality separates “Compulsion” from much of the music now gathered beneath labels such as minimal synth or cold wave. Its equipment is modest and its surface spare, but the recording is not primarily interested in machinery. The machines matter because they expose the person using them. The drum pattern is too naked to become a fashionable groove. The synthesizer is too slight to build a futuristic world. Every electronic sound leaves more room around the voice.
The original record could easily have vanished. It was a small Cherry Red single whose A-side later appeared on the label’s inexpensive Pillows & Prayers compilation, placing Crow’s intimate bedroom-sized song among a much wider collection of early-1980s independent music. The compilation gave “Compulsion” a life larger than the single itself, and Martin Gore’s later version supplied another route through which listeners could encounter it.
The 2015 edition does not treat that afterlife as the main event. Its value comes from returning to Crow’s original proportions.
His version does not perform loneliness from the stage. It seems to discover loneliness while the tape is running.
“Absent Friends,” the original companion piece, occupies the spaces left open by the title song. Its language moves through damaged memory, separation and the strange way a person can remain present through habits of thought after disappearing from daily life. The music is similarly skeletal, but less circular. It feels as though parts have been removed from a song that once stood more confidently.
Where “Compulsion” is trapped by repetition, “Absent Friends” is haunted by gaps.
The title initially suggests remembrance, perhaps even a raised glass offered to people no longer in the room. Crow’s treatment is less ceremonial. Absence is not made noble. It is awkward, unfinished and capable of distorting ordinary objects. Mirrors, rooms and familiar expressions become unreliable because the missing person continues to occupy them indirectly.
The insert makes this connection between music and private life impossible to miss. One photograph shows a young Crow sitting on a bed, holding an instrument while patterned wallpaper, rumpled blankets and scattered domestic objects crowd around him. It is not a heroic musician portrait. The bed seems to function as bedroom, rehearsal room, studio, refuge and temporary stage.
The image gives the music its correct architecture.
These songs do not sound small because Crow lacked larger ideas. They sound small because their emotional force depends upon proximity. A grander recording might have made them more impressive while making them less truthful. Here the listener hears the size of the available room and the limits of the equipment. Imagination is forced to move through narrow passages.
The three pieces added to the reverse side come from another homemade project recorded around the same period. They were part of a miniature album made in a day, with Crow writing the music and photographer Brendan Jackson supplying lyrics. The circumstances are playful and affectionate, but the results do not feel like disposable jokes or bonus-track sweepings.
They expose a different side of the same homemade method.
“Funny to You” is loose, oddly balanced and deliberately slight. Its humor does not arrive through a punch line. It lies in the mismatch between the seriousness of the performance and the homemade apparatus supporting it. Sounds enter with the confidence of a full arrangement even when they appear to have been created from whatever instruments, machines and household objects were available.
“Each to His Own” is more inward. The title proposes tolerance while carrying a faint shrug, the point where acceptance and resignation begin sharing a coat. The track has the shape of a miniature philosophical song, too peculiar to behave like conventional pop but too melodic to become private experiment alone.
“We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back” is the most affecting of the three because it recognizes the impossibility contained in its title. The promise not to look backward can only be made by people already thinking about what lies behind them. Memory enters the sentence before the refusal has been completed.
The music does not dramatize this contradiction. It lets it ache quietly.
Placed at the end of a record assembled more than three decades later, the song acquires another dimension. Everyone involved is necessarily looking back. Old tapes have been located, photographs selected, notes written, memories corrected and people who are no longer present named with love. The release exists because the original promise could not be kept.
The accompanying photographs deepen that ache. A dark image shows a performer or figure nearly disappearing against the surrounding black. Another places a body across a bench in a graveyard, coat spilling toward the ground while headstones and crosses rise behind it. The pose is theatrical and comic, yet death remains stubbornly present in the landscape.
The photograph refuses to choose between nap, collapse and corpse.
That ambiguity belongs beside Crow’s music. His songs can be funny without becoming novelty, mournful without becoming solemn and primitive without being careless. The equipment may be inexpensive, but the emotional calibration is exact.
Even the liner notes preserve this double character. Robert Lloyd remembers the commercial misfortune surrounding Crow’s single with dry humor, while Crow replies by correcting details, teasing the mythology and refusing to treat his own obscurity as sacred tragedy. The exchange makes the record feel lived with rather than embalmed.
Compulsion did not wait in silence for history to declare it important. It moved indirectly through compilations, cover versions, private collections and the memories of the people around it. Its survival resembles its rhythm: return, interruption, return.
Dark Entries presents the material with considerable restraint. The muted printing, archival photographs and generous empty space preserve the homemade intimacy rather than attempting to manufacture a louder period identity around it. The package is substantial, but it never pretends that Crow had secretly made an enormous lost pop album.
He made something more delicate than that.
He made a song whose smallness was part of its emotional intelligence, then surrounded it with other recordings that reveal how porous the border was between composition, friendship, experiment and ordinary domestic time.
The front and back photographs turn the record into a cycle. A figure enters the water, struggles inside it and eventually lies still on the shore. The vinyl follows another cycle, the needle moving through a groove that pulls the music back into existence each time it is played.
That repetition is chosen, but the song understands how quickly choice can become need.
The synthesizer returns.
The drum machine keeps going.
The voice tries once more to make the words sufficient.
Compulsion lasts only a few minutes, but it creates the impression that the song had already begun before the recording and may continue after the needle lifts, somewhere inside the private machinery that keeps a person returning to the same thought.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
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