The North Bay Bohemian just published an article about The Crux! We talked with associate editor about our new album (Now, Ferment), the local music scene, The Insect Carnival, and lots more. You can read it here:
http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/04.08.09/music-crux-0914.html
...Or, better yet, read it here:
Barn Loyalists
Interdependent theatrics and the Crux
By Gabe Meline
The Crux belong in barns, clanging away with armloads of rusted
chains, wailing through cheap electric bullhorns, hoisting ancient
portable cassette players in the air and pressing play, pressing the
buttons half-sewn onto last century's dresses and defrocking the
eternal mystery of theater.
For the past two years, the Crux, from Santa Rosa, have perfected
their Doc-Watson-by-way-of-Joe-Strummer outpourings in all manner of
places: pubs, parties, theaters. But the barns where they where born
and where they belong most—the barns whose splintery wood grain echoes
with countless shanties, cobblestones, murder ballads and bloodied
lace—those barns are destined for goodbye. The conception, the
aspiration, the curettage.
The Boogie Room, the latest barn soon to bid farewell, hosts the
most bittersweet of the Crux's CD release shows this weekend for their
debut album, Now, Ferment.
No other band defined the spirit of the Boogie Room quite like the
Crux, and it's fitting that their album comes out in the same week the
under-the-radar DIY venue closes down. Now, Ferment is the
Crux's child, just as they are the Boogie Room's child, and grandparent
will have one chance to welcome kin into the world before shuffling
off.
"I think we grew together, in a big way," says the Crux's Josh
Stithem, age 26, sitting on the railroad tracks one recent morning.
"Maybe the Boogie Room's the womb, or maybe it's our twin in the womb .
. . Our relationship is pretty deep."
That relationship fostered the Boogie Room's Insect Carnival, where
during each annual three-day festival Stithem and 22-year-old band mate
Tim Dixon presented a holy-rolling barn revival by donning white robes,
lighting candles and shouting a crazed sermon of repentance and
redemption backed by a 10-member choir. Limber backs would bend
backward toward the roof beams, arms shaking, heads baptized with
water. Was it real? Was it a mockery? "We find the sacred in the
profane," is all Stithem says.
The Crux began when Stithem and Dixon met working at Sonoma County
Conservation Action, and for six months before their first rehearsal
they'd discuss creating a traveling vaudevillian troupe of music,
theater and circus performance. "When we started," Dixon says, "we were
like, OK, here's a couple chords, and we'll go up and do whatever the hell onstage."
Now, Ferment compiles that rudimentary energy with all of the
atmosphere of ancient, creaking buildings. Adam LaBelle's booming bass
drum, as if from some other side of a long, abandoned naval base,
punches and uppercuts Stithem's story of black picket fences and bronze
sculptures in "The Loyalist." Rebels and lovers sound false alarms with
Zoe Kessler's haunting, musical saw–like vocals: "I've missed you ever
since you left home," she sings like a terrestrial siren, and, again,
"I've missed you ever since you left home."
Backed by banjo, upright bass, horns, accordion and guitar, the
Crux's lyrics are just as quick to criticize society ("For a good
investment, buy stock in prison cells / Because felonies are Champagne
bubbles for our boys on Capitol Hill") as they are to invoke bizarre
interpretations of the dead ("Marlene Dietrich had a copper groin").
"One weekend," Dixon posits, "we'll play a Pyrate Punx show where
there'll be a bunch of drunk punks, and the next weekend we'll be at a
know-your-neighborhood community-organizing event with a bunch of
middle-aged activists, drinking wine and eating cheese." The variety
isn't an accident, but rather a result of the band's ideal of artists
as connectors, of intersecting paths, of, as it were, a crux. "Being an
independent artist doesn't mean you're cut off from the community,"
says Stithem. "It means you know how to interact with your
environment."
The Crux belong in barns, but they sit here this morning on the
railroad tracks, talking about what comes next. Evidently, it involves
constructing the barn planks into a ship. "And after the pirate ship,"
Stithem explains, "we settle in a small town that's corrupt, with
detectives." Dixon chimes in. They've discussed this. "It's kind of
film-noir, '30s jazz-type stuff meets modern, inner-city hip-hop."
"Yeah," offers Stithem, "we know we're gonna crash-land into the
harbor of Carnegie eventually, but currently we're going from island to
island."
The Crux play with Pete Bernhart from the Devil Makes Three on
Saturday, April 10, at the Last Record Store, (1899-A Mendocino Ave.,
Santa Rosa. 3pm. Free. 707.525.1963); at the Boogie Room and Gardens in
rural Santa Rosa (www.myspace.com/theboogierooom. 8pm. $5); and on
Sunday, April 11, at the Toad in the Hole Pub (116 Fifth St., Santa
Rosa. 8pm. $5. 707.544.8623).