Crack Cloud on “Tough Baby”
Freedom Is An Existential Contingency
Nostalgia gets a bad rep these days. I mean, in HBO’s Watchmen series, nostalgia is even depicted as a prozac-like drug to relieve stress, trauma and memory loss. It’s often seen as a regressive, escapist ploy, a familiar nemesis to progress and innovation. As we collectively sigh and roll our eyes at the latest reboot or intellectual property being deadened by postmodern sardonicism, we search deep within our pockets for sources that rekindle our sense of yearning and wonder again. In a world where everything is at your fingertips, this pursuit can feel strangely suffocating.
But if Canadian multimedia punk collective Crack Cloud proves one thing on their latest LP Tough Baby, it’s that both nostalgia and upheaval can work constructively in tandem. Even more so than their profoundly forward-thinking predecessor Pain Olympics, they opt to go the opposite direction as many of their punk contemporaries, leaning fully into the grandiose, maximalist stylings worthy of a Brazil dream sequence. But where the imagery of Pain Olympics employed sci-fi camp, Tough Baby takes you to a more grounded scenery: the bedroom altar where many incumbent dreams are hatched.
“It’s recalling where I was, and what my bedroom was like when I was fourteen,” drummer/vocalist Zach Choy comments. “My cousin is fourteen on the cover photo. It’s recalling a time — a nostalgia for sure — when things were more simple. You were very vulnerable at that age. The media you consume and the pop culture that you engage with certainly contributes to how you shape your identity. And where you find solace and context in experiences you are living at that time. I think there is definitely a naive sort of idolisation to the media you consume at that age. It informs you in ways — for better or worse — guidelines for how you envision yourself.”
It’s easy to dismiss Crack Cloud as a cerebral band, given how articulate its members orate their origin story and mission statement. The project wasn’t born out of bored art school students, but out of fight-or-flight necessity, using creativity and music as a useful tool to break out of the cycle of addiction and mental illness.
Choy: “The whole rehabilitation narrative feels like ancient history for us. But it is where we come from: Crack Cloud was a project borne out of recovery. There’s a certain involvement when you go through rehab and you do the work, the reconciliation. I think that nuance has never left us, in terms of our conviction when making art. We never want to forget where we come from. That drives us to challenge any kind of barriers or blockades or red flags. Anything that’s telling us to go into one direction when we feel we need to go to the other direction.”
Indeed, Tough Baby frequently courts stylistics that some snobs might consider hokey. Its lead single “Please Yourself” resonates like Tolstoy meets Andrew Lloyd Webber, channeling the naiveté and spirit of a penny-pinching school play. Though lyrically, Choy ruminates deep within to find a level of urgency, beyond platitudinal aggression, cynicism and resignation spewed from the sidelines. “I don’t think that you’re a puppet / But I wonder why you always nosedive /Creeping around in the shade of your blinds /Yeah fucking around speaking of chains.”
Alternately, the album’s title track flirts with Milli Vanilli and Guns ’N’ Roses (!) in shrewd angles that feel truly radical, without cheaply resorting to smarmy pastiche. According to bassist/guitarist Mohammad Ali Sharar, the dazzling stylistic shifts Crack Cloud employs aren’t as calculated as one might think. “I think we all listen to a large range of varying types of sound and music. We noticed that Crack Cloud has never been pigeonholed into a corner, so when we are hearing the varying styles of music, there are no real huge distinctions between one song or the other because of where the musical mindset is. It all fits the mood. But hearing in interviews about the drastic changes in musical stylings and stuff. When you know the theme it all feels related and connected.”
“I think artists have a tendency to talk about their influences, or what’s exactly going on in the music”, keyboardist Aleem Khan chips in. “All we really know is that we are contemporary artists and people who are living in this day and age. All we are doing is filtering down our experience, and it’s always going to be progressive. Not to label it, but musically it’s whatever you want it to be, and whatever we want it to be in the moment. And that can change from moment to moment. All we know is that it’s all love and the biggest aspect to life.”
Indeed, Crack Cloud are not faking the funk, and there’s no room left for denial in their overall output. The music is a planetarian distillation of a grassroots hive mind, not fragmented or dulled by individual whims. This makes their music a wholly thrilling prospect to listen to. Tough Baby gushes with righteous eureka-energy without pulling punches on life’s hard-earned wisdoms. This is made implicit through recurring motifs (the vocal hook on “The Next Fix” returns briefly on the kaleidoscopic “Afterthought: Sukhi’s Prayer”) or repurposing and subverting their past artwork within a new context.
“There’s an atmosphere to Crack Cloud that remains enigmatic to even ourselves,” Choy marvels. “And just by principle of how spontaneous we are in the studio and how much time we spent there, how much time passes and how many people’s voices are involved. And just the transience, and the phenomena in the way we produce, Crack Cloud as an entity exists outside of ourselves. There’s something really subliminal about it. It’s not until we listen back that we make those connections or relations. But subliminally, we are surrendering to a certain atmosphere; an atmosphere we try to instill as accurately as possible as a representation of where we come from. The streets, the conversations that take place, the rollercoaster of existence in our time on earth during this historical moment. It’s about honoring the history of it all, and wondering what it will mean as an artifact decades later for our children and everyone involved.”
Tough Baby starts grounded, with a raw recording of Choy’s father Danny — who passed away from leukemia at age 29 — hoping his poetry and songs will be useful for generations to come. Choy, who is 29 now, points out that this sharing of his personal history isn’t per se an autobiographical cue to the songs, and more so and acts on the value of sharing the past as something to be harnessed and utilized for the future. It suits Choy to deflect a question addressing this to his bandmate Ali Sharar, as Crack Cloud’s directive is always about the collective over the individual.
“There’s not so much a deeper meaning other than what it can give you, “Ali Sharar comments. ”And I think it works as a narrative device at the beginning to allow all your guards to be broken and you can understand the music more in tune with your feeling, less with deconstruction and dissecting. It lent itself to the idea that we wanted to focus a little bit more onto the imagination and an audience listening to these things in their formative years, to form a creative identity for themselves.”
With music that fires on all synapses with rainbow bridge velocity, Tough Baby sounds perpetually bursting at the seams. Crack Cloud appears eager to break from the musical idioms as soon as they adopt them, and even more so than on Pain Olympics, our ears are piqued towards the ‘what’s next?’. That sense of freedom only becomes more palpable when confronting the structures that divide and oppress our cumulative experience.
“When the conversation about freedom comes up, it’s the constant turmoil and the shackles you create for yourself,” Ali Sharar asserts, “limiting ways of tackling ideas and relationships and all sorts of things. Freedom is an all-encompassing, big word. Outside of our literal freedoms, I think we have a lot to work on inside our own head. The freedom to think in ways where we’d normally would feel restrictive. That kind of goes back to growing up religious, we’d had to challenge that and create a sense of freedom and liberation out of creativity. That includes a freedom to speak on subjects that have a stigma or taboo attached to them. And traverse the industry as far as giving everyone an equal opportunity to hear our music and affect them.”
Choy: “Freedom is kind of an existential contingency when it comes to being an artist in general.”
