- The Crooked Fiddle Band are -more than most bands- bound together by passions. There’s a passion for the music: it seems to stretch past their central, surging, hybrid monster of Romany, Balkan, Klezmer with metal and hardcore and postrock through all the connecting world music and spaghetti-western soundtrack ligaments that help glue the fusion together and beyond. There’s a passion for politics, the great issues of the age, screaming out of the few lyrics they seed in their music and pumping urgently through the veins of the orchestration beneath. There’s a passion to get it all out there, to demonstrate the capacity of a band that’s at the height of its powers at an age when most other bands have resigned themselves to office jobs and raising families.
The title of their new record, the first in six years, is Another Subtle Atom Bomb. Well, of course, a Romany-metal-postrock band is never background music. In another sense what The Crooked Fiddle Band are trying to get at is quite subtle indeed. The threat of climate change, a recurring theme on the record, is huge, inescapable, but it’s also slow, moving almost imperceptibly, so that you might almost miss that it was happening. Much of the human population of earth appear to have missed just like that - a subtle atom bomb indeed. So too with the band’s music: this vital, indispensable part of their lives, which takes a back seat when everyday life takes over. In twenty years they might turn around and realise they’d left it all behind, their musical dreams atomised, only the never quite noticed when it happened.
It feels like The Crooked Fiddle Band are juggling multiple atom bombs and hoping that, supposing one or more of them explodes, at least you’ll notice. There’s almost a desperation at times. I read an email they sent out to their mailing list which featured a how-to-support-the-band guide, including helpful tips like, “buy a t-shirt - it’s worth five-thousand Spotify streams.” It plucks at the heartstrings a bit. I mean, there’s a lot of sadness in the music industry and sometimes it can be a bit numbing, but all of the sentiment CFB bring to their cause is justified, mirrored by the energy of the music.
It’s an energy that they know exactly how to employ as well. Bands that play Romany music are often faced with a dilemma when it comes to recording. Much of what they do really comes to fruition via the connections forged playing live on stage and it can be very difficult to capture that lightning in a studio bottle. The Crooked Fiddle Band have worked through that problem, over the course of a decade and several records, previously travelling to the US and getting Steve Albini to try and grab the ‘whole band together’ feel. This time they’ve decided to try and work smarter rather than harder: self-producing the new record and cherry-picking various different studio and live techniques that suit them best. I’ll be honest, thinking you know better than Albini can put you on a path to disappointment, but I think this band may have pulled it off. Another Subtle Atom Bomb has the energy of a stage performance, garnished with all sorts of studio trickery, like feeding their upright bass sound through a snare drum for a truly gnarly type of distortion, along with lots of reinforcing overdubs and these always seem to add something, rather than subtract.
I’ve long felt there’s a nexus between Balkan and heavy music and also an impressive and overlooked power in bands that stick around long after they’ve realised there’s no money in what they’re doing. The Crooked Fiddle Band bring all of that to this record and throw on top their cherished hopes and beliefs for good measure. The existence of Another Subtle Atom Bomb will probably not even be noticed at the next ARIAs, let alone acknowledged, but I urge you to find it and experience the blast, full force.
- Chris Cobcroft.