On Repeat: 'Ghostride' By Crumb
Tristan Young @talltristan
The dulling minutia of a lazy day may not seem like it makes for compelling song craft, but you’d be surprised. ‘Ghostride’ by Brooklyn based group Crumb is a strangely engaging exercise in finding the artistry in the mundane. Guitar triplets percipitate with sedate and placid connotations. It sets a mood that’s just a few shades shy of lucidity, a dazed and anesthetized cadence. The drums and base move forward at a slovenly pace like drifting through traffic moving just slow enough to make you wonder why you even left the house. This is a well suited backdrop for vocalist Lila Ramani’s gorgeous lyrical delivery. Her monotonous style and long form sentence structures makes for a tonnaly sustained and hypnotically level performance. Lines like, “we’ve been stuck out here for too long my phone rings and reminds me I’m alive and I’m feeling kinda high”, work way better than you may expect. The way Ramini just persists continually without any kind of variation or dynamic structure is oddly compelling. She sells it really well. Listen closely enough and you’ll hear additional guitar chords added right at the end of her verses as if to let the instrumentation be her means of enunciating her thoughts. Those thoughts seem to dwell on boredom and detachment. Amidst the diaspora of Brooklyn all she sees is automation. Is this a pejorative view of her peers or admitting her sense of humanity is slipping from her? It’s only an unknown person that she focuses on that brings her back to reality. “Come on now, don’t let this go” she softly begs, the only time she lets feeling or emotion slip through her sullen and calcified shell. She sounds like she feels desperate, but that’s a progressive step away from feeling nothing at all. We listened to ‘Ghostride’ on EP30 of BORP. Check it out on itunes or Spotify or listen to it along with the other tracks we featured on our Apple Music playlist.