Crawlers – The Mess We Seem to Make Review

Testing the waters with EPs, mini mixtapes and singles, a debut record from Crawlers has been a long time coming. Deserved, too. Songs of longing and the thrills of punchy instrumentals underneath a voice which can hold its own is a nice mixture. Opener Meaningless Sex sounds endless, a hell of an experience where love is equated to a desire sharper than shots of heroin and harsher than its aftereffects. Tried and tested images which few can make work as well as the days when the use of rough substances was at its high. The Velvet Underground maintained it, Lou Reed afterwards, and Crawlers made tremendous, impactful use of drugs as imagery for experience thanks to their thumping, whining and rising wall of sounds-like quality.  

Holly Minto and the band are no strangers to such studio styling, their early works were rallying around such a force of powerful sound. It is not that The Mess We Seem to Make has mellowed, it is just pulling punches to leave the desire for love in a loveless place hit harder. Light grunge flitters on Kiss Me relay the same at-odds feeling and sensations of opener Meaningless Sex but do so with the fine line between a longing for romanticism and the feelings we sacrifice to get some replication of it. Minto makes some headstrong developments, charting how far some will go not for love but a reciprocation of feeling. To the extremes, we fall for the sake of chance companionship, and the maturity of how these parallels are drawn with mental harm should be no surprise.  

Crawlers consistently proved their understanding of mood and tone through these earlier singles, on their self-titled EP. Plenty of new wonders are available – though the buzz of sex compared to drugs continues. Make no mistake, The Mess We Seem to Make is a varied record – it charts a modern fear with single Would You Come To My Funeral challenging the status quo not of love but of how it is shown and progresses. Credit to the instrumental work, the wailing piano and the delicacy of the transition between this lead single and Golden Bridge. It proves what was unsaid but necessary to speak of, that Crawlers has a plethora of range, but are waiting for the right time to use it. 

Relapse, relearn to love and respect yourself enough to hear out the horrors and heartbreak Crawlers present. Exceptional efforts throughout and the damaging implications heard throughout are all too true. They will shock the system and drag you down if you do not deploy some restraint though it is hard to do so when you feel the intimate waves. You can drown in those feelings, as the likes of What I Know Is What I Love detail. The Mess We Seem to Make is a warm embrace, an understanding nod to the expanse of tricky feelings being more than we can deal with. We are not always in control of our emotions, and it is all too easy to spiral – Crawlers does an excellent job of making those gut punches of reality count.