Review Summary: You'll never forget how they made you feel.
If nostalgia rock were a genre, Crumb would be the best at it. The Boston-based band met in college, and Locket was their second release. The sound is so ethereal, so dreamy, it gives the listener a sense of unreality. It’s as if you heard these songs while dreaming in a deep sleep, and you try to remember them after you’ve woken up.
Psychedelic tones wash over your body like waves, like something warm and pure and familiar. The way "Plants" just melts at the end into this gooey, wonderful breakdown, it feels like the mind turning itself over and over again into putty. The way those guitars dip and come right back up on "Recently Played" just has the most delicious jam about it, and yet the sound is just too cohesive to have been improvised. Then the siren winds up at the start of "Thirty-Nine", and the bass is so subdued but it's entirely appropriate, just a really great anchor to the overlying riffs that sort of fade in and out of thin air. Lila Ramani's voice is so completely relaxed and soft, that it almost feels like the ghost of one dearly departed is singing the words.
That slow keyboard line on "Locket" rocks back and forth until it speeds up, the tempo coming closer and faster until it crashes against the distortion as waves crash over a large rock. But it doesn't break on the rocks; it lingers, and in come the drums as you sink into the world's metaphor. You are within the locket, a memory of someone far away or maybe even gone forever. Your world is shaped and molded by the movement of your wearer; you awaken in the night when they are lonely and sleep until you are missed. And always, you feel the heart beating with the weight of the memory. It is a deeply sentimental anthem to the lonely, listless and heartbroken parts that live within each of us. Because we all miss something, a person, a place, a time. To remember always the beating in our hearts and the closeness of that "something" in our memory; it is the stuff of immortality.
In a lot of ways, this is the EP that "made" Crumb, to this day Locket remains their most-played song ever, and it was a testament to the moving, psychedelic sound this band does. We'll all be very excited to see where the music goes, and keep it in our memory.
