Crack Cloud – Peace And Purpose

Crack Cloud have always been one of those bands I’ve always felt I should be more into. Peace And Purpose — their fourth record, apparently made in Zach Choy’s basement with one microphone and a bunch of “junk instruments” (his words, not mine, though I’m not sure the distinction matters much here)—arrives with all the gravity of a band who really, truly believe in what they’re doing. And maybe, for me, that’s the problem.

At 14 tracks and nearly 50 minutes, Peace and Purpose has a lot of ground to cover and somehow still manages to feel like it’s going nowhere. The industrial textures are there. The avant-garde protest energy is there. The dungeon-dub moaning is very much there. But somewhere between “Marathon of Hope” and “Thoughts on My Faith,” the whole thing just sort of… gets lost in the sauce. You keep waiting for the album to arrive somewhere, and it keeps insisting that the journey is the destination, man. Okay. Sure.

Standout moments — and there are some — get swallowed whole by the album’s relentless commitment to atmosphere over momentum. “Shut the Fuck Up” at least has a title with some urgency to it, which is more than can be said for the pacing around it. “Phantom Limb” has a nice weight to it, briefly. Then the record trudges on.

Choy describes the sessions as being like “an ayahuasca trip.” That tracks. It’s immersive, occasionally transcendent, and about forty minutes longer than you wanted it to be.

Fans of the collective’s earlier work will find things to admire. Everyone else will find a very sincere, very murky record that mistakes density for depth. There’s a great 35-minute album in here somewhere. Unfortunately, it is buried under the other 15 minutes of sauce.