CRASH VEGAS COMES TO MAXWEL’S,
Crash Vegas. To discerning fans of a certain age, the name conjures up memories of a more innocent time, when a tuneful quartet with an original idea could kick-start an off-script music trend that would be fondly remembered a quarter century later.
“‘Red Earth’ was born of desire and ambition,” guitarist Colin Cripps has said of the iconic album that set the tone for the band’s short-lived career.
“Mixed with a love for Rebel Hippie Country, The Great Canadian Landscape, Nina Simone, the search for the lasting phrase, Punk Rock Balladeers and the heat of an Acadian night.”
Twenty one years after their breakup, they’re back, with a lineup that includes three founding members: Cripps, lead singer Michelle McAdorey and drummer Ambrose Pottie.
The occasion: the re-release of their 1990 debut on 180 gram vinyl and, for the first time, digitally.
The payoff: a concert re-enactment — first stop: Waterloo — that promises the musical resurrection not only of the ambient indie folk-pop classics that set them apart in the age of metal, grunge and Milli Vanilli, but the “melancholic optimism” that fuelled their entire existence.
“For some reason, it’s never completely dark,” laughs vocalist McAdorey, addressing the band’s intriguing emotional cross-currents on the phone from Toronto.
“The door is never closed. There’s an optimism for me underneath. I can’t say I’ve really figured it out. There’s definitely a mystery.”
This is what artists are like. While the rest of us pay the hydro bill and clean cat vomit off the couch, they examine their interior lives with delicacy and finesse.
And if they have talent, like McAdorey, they produce a masterwork that resonates 27 years later.
“All I know is I listen to a lot of music — old, new — and there’s a total re-emergence of psychedelic folk and folk rock,” she notes humbly. “Where do we fit in? I have no idea.” Ultimately, it’s about ambience. Crash Vegas were one of a roster of early ’90s bands — Cowboy Junkies, Skydiggers, Blue Rodeo — who melded cascading alt-country narratives with frothy acoustic instrumentation and an arid, otherworldly subtext that segued into your soul.
Front and centre were McAdorey’s pensive vocals, a morass of wistful reflection that delved into the nuances, eager to explore bold new trajectories with tenderness and determination.
Songs like “Sky,” “Smoke,” “Inside Out,” “Julia Rain” and “Bury Her” were pocket symphonies of joyful seclusion, quiet introspection and opaque yearning for ... what?
“It’s kind of a channelling,” notes McAdorey, who co-wrote most of the songs. “It’s like trying to work something out. A kind of spell.
“Sometimes when we’re happy we don’t question things too much. When your defences drop, you get down to what’s essential. In the midst of melancholy is love.” Existential flakiness? Nah. There’s no question McAdorey and bandmates tapped into some deeper currents with an album described by Allmusic.com as “a seemingly effortless alt-country masterpiece years before alt-country even existed.”
People compare them to the Cowboy Junkies, but it’s not really accurate.
The Junkies were about tempo, specked with a sort of elegiac sadness.
Crash Vegas, even at their most reflective, were accessible, with bright perky melodies and a jangly folk-rock backdrop to smooth out dark nights of the soul.
“It’s in my nature — that melancholy, but also a huge amount of optimism,” laughs McAdorey, explaining the album’s strange but alluring tilt. “I like contradictions. It’s not only this or that — but this AND that.”
It was a unique and delicate formula that couldn’t last, and by 1996 — after two more albums and the departure of key band members — McAdorey and Cripps were ready to call it quits.
“I just wanted to step away and have a bit of time to try things in a different way,” confides the genial crooner, insisting there was no bad blood between band members (though original bassist Jocelyne Lanois won’t be participating in the reunion).
“I needed a break from the corporate mould of music. I felt burned out.” The solution? “I hung out with artists, made my first record independently, extracted myself from a really awful relationship and ended up having a kid. Finally I emerged — free.”
When the idea of reuniting Crash came up a few months ago, the timing seemed right.
“Some of those songs really hold up,” she notes succinctly. “Malcolm Burns, who produced the record, did odd things and created cool sounds. Out of the three Crash Vegas records, ‘Red Earth’ is the most timeless.”
But make no mistake: it ain’t nostalgia.
Taking her cues from idols like Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Buffy Saint Marie, McAdorey sees her music inhabiting the world of the present: vibrant, resonant, speaking to the here and now.
“I think of people who have blown me away, they seem ageless to me,” she says of her idols. “When I see Patti Smith, she’s youthful and wise and old. She can inhabit it all ... in the present.
“You put music out there and it starts to have its own life. Now we get to live all these songs and reinhabit them.”
Come on — it’s not as if her penchant for bittersweet reflection has waned over time.
“To experience life fully, you have to know sadness, to feel your heart crack open,” she says, paraphrasing a song by Canadian legend Leonard Cohen. “Not just in love — in life itself.
“Singing ‘Red Earth’, there’s a youthful melancholy that, quite honestly, even now I understand.”