Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Crash Romeo
Label: Trustkill Records
Release: 2006
A flood of more or less decent and less decent emo bands pick unhappy love stories, wrecked relationships between man and woman, death and transience as the central theme of their music, and the lads from Crash Romeo had no intention of dodging this basic principle either. In 2006 they tried to break new ground and burn themselves as deep into your mind and memory as they possibly could with the album Minutes To Miles, put out by Trustkill Records. This five-piece of tattooed punk wannabe lookalikes would rather wail about their sad love lives than rage against the system, and they document those woes, sparse but carefully, in carefully crafted songs. The lineup is Travis Weber, lead throat and guitarist, backed on drums by his brother Ryan Weber, while the rest of the band is guitarist and vocalist Steve Anderson, keyboardist Adam Nordmeyer and bassist Steve Mathews.
New Jersey becomes the backdrop for a collage of twelve tracks on a journey that measures time in minutes and miles. Romeo is a tragic hero dropped into modern times, and instead of sparkling passion and tenderness he serves up a pretty bitter salvo of world-weariness right out of the gate. ‘Minutes To Miles’ is a catchy, pop-leaning punk tune that will remind you of a slightly more tenor-sounding Green Day long before it reminds you of, say, the screaming Aiden. The boys are saying their goodbyes and heading off across the border and beyond. Into the hazy unknown of tomorrow. If home was, until yesterday, a place that offered precious little besides sadness and alienation over a bottle of cheap wine, all hope for a better tomorrow now pours into movement and escape. It’s like reading a remake of the opening chapters of Jack Kerouac’s cult classic On the Road, except that here there’s no digging into nicely phrased paragraphs, and the five young guys tackle the subject in a much more laid-back, carefree way.
‘Serious’ is an ode to “love” conquests and partying, where flesh is just flesh. The heart may be just a lump of flesh, but something other than the chilled blood of two lovers can flow through the veins, two lovers who, after giving each other passionate kisses and doing the math of subtracting clothes and adding up bodies, figured out that this is really all they have in common. Responsibility to another human being, or to yourself, isn’t even offered as an option, so the song rattles past you in its saccharine rhythm like a merry-go-round. It leaves precious little on your brain or your heart, because the shallow drama of unanswered questions Ryan keeps asking doesn’t exactly move you.
‘Get Up Shut Up’ continues the previous story. After a string of repeated mistakes, Ryan decides it’s time for the final reckoning and for ending the romance they were pouring into your cup in the last track. “Get Up! Shut Up! / And get the fuck out of here! / We’ll Say it was the last time!” Fake and wishy-washy.
Much more polished, and on first listen trying to smooth over the rough edges, is the song about confessing eternal love. ‘Die In Your Arms’ tells you what happens when the lightning bolt of true love actually splits you in two. Love is a disease, and if it’s the real deal, the next step is just counting the grains of sand in the hourglass of our lives and a growing awareness that in 50 or 60 years one of the lovers will die before the other, leaving the surviving partner with a gaping hole of eternal, painful longing. Dying in the arms of your dearest is the main theme with which the lovestruck Romeos blow on your soul, stir up some sentiment and then fade out into something completely different.
‘Actions Not Words’ goes back to ending something that was a mistake. Gotta clean house and cut off the excess baggage, right? The easiest thing is to make excuses that it was just a moment of weakness and that nothing was meant the way it sounded. Ryan and company are masters of throwing sand in your eyes. ‘Heading West’ continues the epic about the road far away. Apparently they crossed the border and came right back where they started, because they ran out of gas for the longer haul. Going far away takes balls, and the thinly squeaking tandem of mic-wielding singers in Crash Romeo, nice and polished and pop-sounding as they are, doesn’t have any. Before they leave, they still need confirmation that the plan is the only right and fair thing to do. Totally juvenile and overwrought. And we’re really only at the beginning!
The acoustic intro of the next song, ‘Hang Your Head’, soon goes silent in an explosion of full-swing string-strumming. I stop bothering with the lyrics and tune in to the chemistry of the instrumental craftsmanship, which, I have to admit, is flawless and polished to the last detail. But the soul is missing. The solos sound like they were sampled off Pop Design records, then baked in the oven at the wrong temperature, chromed and drenched in sweeteners so that the crap, which there is little of, would be edible. In the Crash Romeo world there are only two dimensions, with just shades of red, passionate, and white, empty.
And the boys clearly know it, since at their tender age they seek comfort in booze and an alcoholic haze that takes it upon itself to shed other people’s tears. ‘From The Bottom Of This Bottle’ is an outpouring of joy and revenge. Cheated on, hurt and drunk. The goodbye is still unspoken. The farewell is in full swing, and maybe booze will make up for the missing balls? “Thank You from teh bottom of this bottle!”? Apparently we’ve hit rock bottom in the discourse of love. Time for a more entertaining language of self-destruction. Party! The pathos of ‘The Hot Comodity’ takes it a step further: “You’ve got nothing on me / And I will go in history / for being the best you’ll ever see in your life…”. And right at this point we reach the most sensitive moment of the record, and the track becomes the trump card of everything they’ve lined up so far. The guitars are practically U2-esque, a slight disco beat and keyboards smoldering in the background in an eighties manner make for a fitting complement. The sons repeat the sins of their fathers and fall into the restrained voluptuousness of the most sincere revenge for a stolen and trampled past.
‘Dial “M” For Murder’ is a song inspired by the film of the same name by the master of suspense – Alfred Hitckoka. Apart from the title, it has nothing in common with the mastery of that legendary director. They just fell for a nice-sounding film title. More sentimental and pompous is the thoroughly polished closing farewell, which leaves a slightly less cloying taste in your mouth than the polka of hopping tunes that makes up the rest of the record. Crash Romeo redeem themselves for all the other nonsense with probably the least clichéd track in their musical output, and the winner of the record, at least in my eyes, is ‘On Deaf Ears We Ride Tonight’. They actually put passion and longing into words, and if they’d stopped right there, you wouldn’t have missed a thing.
I could wrap up this review with the thought that Crash Romeo are a real reflection of Americanization, American pop culture and a symbolic embodiment of alienation in a world that holds us in its strict, cold embrace of permissive allowance, so that in our scatteredness we drive ourselves to the edge of madness. The next step depends only on the daring or the posing of whoever fakes sincerity in all that heaped-up rambling. In their own way, Crash Romeo are even deep. Like a two-foot-deep pool. They’ve definitely got melody. Next time, though, they should work out the content a bit more, because crap wrapped in cellophane and sprinkled with pearls is still crap, and since it’s not polite to dwell on feces for too long, let me just say that they’re a long way from perfection, but as a start it’s promising that they at least have the bare minimum: instruments, an ear and the will to say something.
Lineup
Travis Weber – vocals, guitar
Ryan Weber – drums, percussion
Steve Anderson – guitar, vocals
Lil’ Steve Mathews – bass, vocals
Adam Nordmeyer – keyboards, vocals
Production
Chris Badami
Track list
1. Minutes To Miles
2. Serious
3. Get Up, Shut Up
4. Die In Your Arms
5. Actions Not Words
6. Heading West
7. Hang Your Head
8. From The Bottom Of This Bottle
9. Hot Commodity
10. Dial M For Murder
11. On Deaf Ears We’ll Ride Tonight
ALBUM LENGTH:
