5 out of 5

Label: Sargent House

Produced by: Bryce Brown & Erik Blood

Hi, my name is press release, and I make sure to mention that Erik Blood worked with Shabazz Palaces and Steve Snere is from These Arms Are Snakes, so you should expect some fusion of hip-hop and hardcore.  And there are some bleeps and bloops that maybe suggest that, and Snere is droning on in the background about something, so… sure.  But it’s a bit underwhelming.

I was listening to it wrong.

Fittingly, I ‘discovered’ These Arms Are Snakes after having the their discs in my collection for years and putting ‘Easter’ on one night and suddenly just hearing it for the masterpiece it was, when all precious listens hadn’t done a thing for me.  Now to Crypts: I’m going through my collection for these reviews, and I let the disc play on repeat during a walk around my neighborhood.  …And how is this possibly the same album?  It came to life.  Where before it’d all blended together, now Bryce Brown’s amazing synth work stretched and reached into peaks and valleys, and menacing beats would suddenly shudder in at the right moment.  Snere, just as powerful as in his TAAS work, pushed behind a veil of distortion and mystery, yet experimenting with more range on the gut / heart / ear-wrenching ‘Breathe’ or the slowburn explosion of ‘Sleazy.’  Yeah, he’s done the speak-shout, shout-shout routine before, but his vocals are just another layer in the mix here; you can’t really hear what he’s saying, and his words and screams fuzz in and out of the general buzz…  so it’s a new way to experience his mastery of delivery.

I come out on the other side not hearing hip-hop or hardcore, but rather industrial.  Touches of :wumpscut: on ‘Daft,’ some notes of early NiN layering on ‘Smut,’ and other things I’m not smart enough to catch.  As much as a strong singer / songwriter can be your fave, he or she taking over whatever project with which they’re involved, I do love when individual identity is lost to the group.  Crypts are a force.  ‘Completely Fucked’ announces its presence with a stutter of vocals and clipped beats, Blood’s flat production underplaying the low-end so that you’re forced to consume this all at face value: when the volume on ‘Daft’ soars, you’re not just caught by a beat – you’ve no choice but to take it all in.  And then it ends, and if it caught you the way it did me, you’re scrambling to hit play again to figure out how the fuck you missed all of this goodness.