Krill was formed in Boston in 2010, and recorded three LPs and two EPs of strange, grungy, and sometimes catchy songs before playing their final-ish show in Brooklyn in 2015. They released another album in 2020 under the name Knot, but that’s a Krill album, too, because it’s easier that way. Krill is now a trio based in Chicago, where all the current members grew up: songwriter Jonah Furman, longtime drummer Ian Becker, and new guitarist Andrew Clinkman.
“Commemorative Plaque” is Krill’s first new music in years, released via their longtime label Exploding in Sound. In his beautifully mundane way, Furman’s first lyrics back in front of a microphone present themselves like he’s being dragged to it: “I have said what I have to say / And I don’t know what any of it meant / But if it helps you, use it / Polish it / Sand it / Or sharpen it”. Becker’s drums begin to propel the song away from the chorus’s echo of Aretha Franklin’s “Call Me,” escalating to a fist-pumping bridge followed by an anxiety-inducing outro featuring skronking, stuttering guitarwork from Clinkman.
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Clifford’s Golden Caravan is an album that arrives at an era of unprecedented American affluence and comfort, but also one underscored by widespread disillusionment and a sense of impending crisis. The record can be experienced on a phone that doubles as a professional recording studio or photo editing suite, in a car with fully automated navigation, through a streaming service that offers just about every piece of commercially recorded music in existence. And yet, that same phone can readily livestream unspeakable brutality, and for a technology built for communication, is remarkably adept at making you feel alone. As you fill your tank, head to work, and pay your subscriptions, it’s hard not to wonder whether there’s any way to ethically participate in the status quo. It’s also understandable that so many of us sometimes slip into distraction, cynicism, and isolation. But for those desperately straining to hold all these truths at once, you might find consolation in Clifford’s bold and beautiful second album.
The cognitive dissonance between our personal comforts and collective needs, the loving of the place and the hatred for the empire—these are the exact things Golden Caravan is about.
After a half decade of establishing themselves as one of the most promising bands in Boston’s underground scene, Clifford have hit their stride. Inspired equally by local legends like Pile and Horse Jumper of Love and groups carrying forth the torch of Heartland rock, Golden Caravan merges the burnished, melodic folk of Clifford’s past recorded work with the feral force of their live shows. It’s a work of paradox, where the harmonic feedback is a thing of beauty and the acoustic guitars bludgeon with blunt force.
The creation of Golden Caravan itself was born of the struggle to fit art into the requirements of “real life.” The quartet of Danny Edlin, Miles Chandler, Ben Curell and Nate Scaringi carefully crafted these songs for hours at a time on Monday nights after their day jobs, sometimes leaving the studio long after midnight. The porous boundaries of work/life and main project/side project are illustrated in the communal contribution to Golden Caravan, as Mei Semones, Paper Lady and Sweet Petunia provide instrumental backing and harmonies.
Amidst the noise, Clifford endeavors to bring moral clarity to existential complications, questioning complicity and complacency and how to be a good person in a time of pervasive evil. On these subjects, Clifford write what they’ve lived; “I write when I feel overwhelmed in my life,” Chandler explains, “I want to disobey the impulse to keep these things private.” Clifford opens the album in a functionally numb state of existence on “Trackstarr,” while the ensuing “C Song” transposes the acerbic wit of MJ Lenderman onto the concussive desolation of Unwound. In the decades artists have spent trying to distill the emotional whiplash of the news cycle and the constant onslaught of spectacle on social media, perhaps no epigram has ever been so on point as, “well I know it’s sick / but I can’t look / I can’t look away.”
Throughout Golden Caravan, Clifford doesn’t just look, they actively search for our common bonds, in day-drives through Christian states, childhood homes turned into Vrbos, the everyday struggles of good people against drudgery and exploitation. Sometimes, the pain feels like too much to endure (“grieve in bulk: economize”). Sometimes, you can’t do anything but laugh; “where the dirt gathers in little outlines of your feet, assume the position,” Chandler intones on “Gifthorse,” a modern day workingman’s blues.
The scope of Golden Caravan expands beyond the cubicle, coming into focus on the title track where Clifford, joined by Zack Wiggs on pedal steel, reckons with the spiritual effects of living through a time marked by mass shootings and genocide. “The money changes everything if you can stomach it / And if you can stomach it / You will swallow anything,” Chandler warns, building to a fevered climax that can barely contain its rage: “I’ve seen the atrocity with my own eyes / you cannot tell me what I know.” There’s a dozen concurrent atrocities that this lyric could apply to right this moment and likely a dozen more that will follow in coming months.
It’s easier to feel cynical and discouraged than it is to make an album like Golden Caravan that proposes righteous, communal indignation as our greatest hope. “It feels good to name that stuff out loud,” Chandler explains, “there’s a catharsis in realizing that the unidentifiable malaise and melancholy that sometimes follows us around has broader causes and lives in a social context. By naming these experiences, I feel that we can reclaim some power over them.”
Izzy True is an indie rock band currently based in Philly. They have played guitar music regardless of public sentiment towards guitar music since 2015. Izzy True’s current ALL-STAR LINEUP includes Izzy Reidy (Tenci), Andy Molholt (Speedy Ortiz, Special World), Lucas Knapp (2nd Grade, Hour), and Al Resh (Another Michael).