Adrian Crowley returns with a brooding collection of songs.
Four years after ‘The Watchful Eye Of The Stars’, Adrian Crowley returns with his 10th studio offering, the John Parish-produced ‘Measure of Joy’. What is immediately striking about the tracks on this album is the dominance of Crowley’s rich baritone. With its undercurrent of menace and delinquent boredom it expresses poetic lyrics in a not-quite-singing, not quite-spoken-word delivery which adds a level of intrigue and ambiguity to a number of songs. ‘Measure of Joy’ with its jaunty Latin rhythm is a sparse and yes joyous song but Crowley’s deadpan baritone gives it a morose quality, the “La La” refrain beginning to come across as ennui. ‘Swimming In The Quarry’ has a minimalist heart-beat rhythm and recalls ‘night swimming’ but again the baritone changes the mood. It gives it a strange, sinister quality and the slow building discordant ending does little to temper the general uneasiness of the track. The upbeat bossa rhythm of album closer ‘Cherry Blossom soft confetti’ is in stark contrast to the cemetery references and elegiac “shadows are stretching out and I know it won’t be long”.
Crowley brings a poet’s eye view of the world to his lyrics. ‘Transmission Lost’ has a simple musical arrangement that sits under a beguiling description of sunlight glancing off modern infrastructure and a mobile phone call with a dodgy line whilst ‘The Trembling Cup’ details a moonlit drink from a river in exquisite detail. Some tracks do have a tendency towards lyrically density. In ‘Lost at Last’ the narrator sinks into the arms of a new love where “She drinks my tears through dead of night” and suffers an “existential crush” all set to a ‘Hallelujah’ style set of arpeggios and in ‘Tangled’ clarinets and haunting vibraphone accompany a nocturnal outing with “the stars still twinkling Like trinkets in a pawnshop window”.
Stand-outs include ‘Genevieve of the Mountain’ with its 80s drum machine-style groove accompanying an almost spoken word story about a mysterious Parisian who can confound The Grim Reaper; and the touching ‘Brother was a Runaway’ which narrates the loss of an elder sibling.
If the album has a fault it is that Crowley’s distinctive voice often over-powers the album’s delicate palette of instrumentation, and because of this the songs do begin to merge and feel a little one-paced. Putting that aside, it is a fine night-time collection, not only in tone with its minimal orchestral arrangements and brooding vocals, but also lyrically with nocturnal imagery woven through each track.
