Crimson Glory – Strange and Beautiful

Reviewed - 08.04.07

Crimson Glory have always been an anomaly for me. Friends I have tortured over the years have either loved or hated them. Strangely only polar opposites Neurosis had the same effect. Mind you, that was before everyone grew beards. I traded the first album on the back of a C-90 (that’s a 90 minute cassette tape kids) with Candlemass on the other side. My 16 year old self didn’t know what the fuck he was listening to but loved it and I still do, even though they looked and sounded distinctly glammie. I didn’t and still don’t care, it was thrashy, heavy, fast, slow, beautifully melodic in parts and generally completely gonzo! I’ve turned on a few people to the insane mental thrash glories of Mayday and many have raised the horns.

However, I never applied myself to their other albums. When we did cross paths, I heared some other, watered down, version of my secret love. So as I tackle this, the third album Crimson Glory release, the second being Transcendence, my opinion is only confirmed by my previous listens. This is the sound of a band experimenting, I’ll give them that, but this is experimentation with a view to cashing in those guitar skills for… money? drugs? blowjobs? While I shouldn’t really be surprised, this is only a vaguely similar band to the Crimson Glory of their debut album. Gone is the crazy speed and insane guitar work. Midnight still retains much of his vocal style, but little of the fire remains.

The problem being that the band has simply opted to chase the stadium hair rock dollar. Either that or they plain forgot to play heavy guitar and instead made a lush, keyboard laden, soft rock, ball-less, female soul singing layered… well, you get the picture. If you like those 2nd rate glam rock bands that still soil rock discos up and down the land, you’ll like this. Christ, it’s horrible. It’s the kind of thing you chewed off your fingers watching MTV’s Headbangers Ball while waiting for them to maybe play a Megadeth video. It’s a damn shame as there are tiny snippets of decent rock, the opening title track being a case in point; it’s catchy but it… er, rocks. That said, most of the rocking tracks are of that Led Zeppelin Whole Lotta Love/Kashmir style, which was much in vogue with hair metal bands at the time.

Unfortunately, by track two, Promised Land, the game is already up. That typical horrid striding bass, muted guitar and terribly commercial female backed chorus. It just smells of session musicians, made for MTV safe-rock. Third track Love and Dreams is even lighter, a simple rock ballad, acoustic guitar, soft keyboards. Extreme, Poison, it reminds me of all of that stuff. It’s just rock by numbers, the antithesis of integrity. The rest of the songs sound similarly dated covering all of the basic cock-rock styles of the late 80’s. Band pictures on the sleeve confirm the horror. Not my thing. At all.

There is a bizarre interview on the CD where Midnight and band leader Jon Drenning discuss each song, alluding to sexually related themes throughout. The whole thing just reeks of record company interference and too many drugs. The positive comments culled from mainstream rock magazines of the time are very telling too. Looking at the penchant for screamo boy bands now, they’d balk at this. Funny, the more things change, the more they stay the same (woah, woah).