Melanie Crew – Midnight Sounds EP
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| Melanie Crew - Midnight Sounds |
Release Date: Out Now
I’ve been deliberating over this
opening sentence for a while but I’m just going to say it; I think Melanie Crew
needs to move. You see, this isn’t my first time listening to her work and she
has such a gentle, comforting, home-spun sound that it always amazes me when I
see her current location as London. Don’t get me wrong, I had 10 mostly
wonderful years in London but I feel like Melanie must have Rhino thick skin to
have survived in that city with such a seemingly gentle demeanour. Nonetheless,
survive she has and grateful we must be for that fact (sorry, started
channelling Yoda there for a minute).
This new five track EP begins
with the end-of-the-day lament of ‘Evening Light’ that is full of poise, sadness
and the gentle regret you get when you know you’re having a great time but,
right in the middle of that great time, you realise that it will have to end at
some point. On ‘Visions’ Crew strips things back even more to the raindrop
pitter-patter of guitar notes and her soft, vulnerable voice calling out in the
twilight hours. ‘The Place I Knew’ is strangely reminiscent of ballads by the
likes of REM and Foo Fighters in its key changes but that voice is so very
English this might as well be Mary Poppins at an open-mic night making the
audience fall in love with every practically perfectly pronounced word.
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| Melanie Crew |
Things take a turn towards the
minor notes on ‘Out of Sight’ which allows Crew to expand her vocal range and
create a song that would fit in perfectly on an album by LWM favourites Sound
of the Sirens. The EP closes with ‘Stay All Night’ which switches things up to
a more electric guitar sound and Crew sings “I don’t know anything about but I
know I’ve spent too many minutes thinking what if we could begin again
tonight”. Lyrically this EP is full of sadness and laments but with a real
sense of enjoying that emotion – not quite wallowing but certainly finding
comfort in it. Only one of these songs comes in at more than three minutes and
I think that’s the key to Melanie Crew’s tunes is that they might be gentle and
vulnerable but they get to the point, they are engaging and they aren’t
self-indulgent. That said, I do feel the urge to put an arm around this EP, buy
it a drink and tell it that everything will be OK if it just hangs in there.
More information: https://www.facebook.com/melaniecrewmusic/
Download the EP: https://melaniecrew.bandcamp.com/