Not long after release in 2006, I penned the following: "This is their 3rd album and the grades on the first 2 are mediocre. Wow – I like this one! I guess this is what I expect out of a modern progressive group. It’s all instrumental but accessible – not esoteric in that European way that seems to turn off more mainstream listeners. But not so vapid as to turn off more grizzled veterans like myself. Complex and mathy, nice mix of modern and vintage instrumentation including keys and reeds. Another band who’s heritage can be traced to the At The Drive In family tree (Mars Volta, Sparta)."
In 2017, I reviewed the predecessor, where I did a better job of capturing the essence of Crime in Choir: "San Francisco's Crime in Choir are like a number of bands to appear in the second millennial landscape. The music is exceptional, and the audience for it at the time was nil or fleeting. Especially here in America where creativity was at a high, but the data to find such gems was hard to filter. I only knew of the band because they wrote me directly to review their 3rd album Trumpery Metier, which impressed me on impact (2006). So a little exploration had me going back one album further, which would be The Hoop... As I arrive on RYM's entry, I see math rock as the genre. Crime in Choir is math rock in the same sense as an instrumental Soft Machine and Egg are. Don Caballero, Crime in Choir is not. And thus lies the problem with our modern situation. I can certainly understand the assertion (perhaps the band themselves made it...), but for those of us raised in a different generation, instrumental progressive rock is what we would have thought on first listen. And so had it been marketed to such an audience, the end result would have probably been the same from a financial perspective. And totally different from an artistic one. The music found on The Hoop is highly melodic, and keyboard driven. Even space rockish at times. No, Crime in Choir are not Canterbury, and they are certainly modern. And yet my comparisons hold."
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In hearing it again last night, all the observations I made for The Hoop hold here. In my initial review, I did use the word "mathy". Now I recall the details: The band had sent me an online download - not the CD. And of course a promo package to go with it. I stopped dealing with these "zero dollar investment" review pleas almost before I started. And the band's rarely would even say thank you. In any case, they did refer to themselves as math rock, but that was more the term of the day as I noted above. The timing of hearing this recently is that, interestingly enough, it reminded me quite a bit of Mahogany Frog, another similar band operating at the same time but up north a ways. These CDs remain stubbornly cheap, so if you do have a physical collection, I'd grab a copy if all the above sounds good.
Ownership: CD: 2006 Gold Standard Laboratories. Purchased a year later from my initial review. Interesting artwork. Comes with a tri-fold booklet with photos of the band. Seems they didn't market themselves correctly, as they were clearly a retro prog band with a different motivation. Maybe not a financial boon, but certainly from an artistic legacy perspective.
7//06; 3/26/07; 11/27/22 (new entry)
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