Vancouver collective Crack Cloud burst onto the scene in 2018 with two independently released EPs- followed up by their first full length album, Pain Olympics, in 2020. The multimedia collective features an ever changing line up of musicians, filmmakers, designers and artists. Originally formed by Zach Choy (lead vocals, drums) and Mohammed Ali Sharar (keyboards) as an outlet for their emotions and frustrations regarding their drug habits. The duo quickly found other like minded local artists and cemented the band’s philosophy: cultivating self betterment and collectivism. Choy has stated multiple times that the band is a “healing mechanism”.
While 2022’s Tough Baby is notably more polished than their previous work, they haven’t lost their core message. Tough Baby’s opening track “Danny’s Message” is a recording from frontman Zach Chou’s father Danny. The intro sets the tone for the album with an emotional note from Danny who died at 29, the same age as Zach today, telling him to create, express himself and make music. Unsurprisingly, for a band known for their creative and chaotic expression, the note is cut through with a lush string arrangement that crashes into a tension filled undercurrent, eventually fading back to Danny’s words. With that the album’s thesis is set: music as therapy and an outlet for emotion (namely anger). “The Politician” and “Costly Engineered Illusion” twitch and writhe with an accelerated beat and frantic tone calling to mind The Damned and Talking Heads. It’s impossible to listen to these tracks without placing them in context- namely Vancouver’s catastrophic housing crisis. Over the summer the band spent time in Slovakia staging a theatre production on Western Canada’s housing crisis. “Please Yourself” starts off on a simmer with a pleasantly bouncy bassline and layered vocals. At the halfway mark it explodes into the emotional and musical heart of the album with a guitar solo and chanted lyrics before lapsing into a delicate piano coda. “Virtuous Industry” feels the closest to Crack Cloud's previous work (plus some added saxophone). The building percussion, overlaid laughter and radio announcements coil in your chest and drop into a pit of dread. “Criminal” cracks like a storm weighed down with a toxic sludge of anger while “115 at Night” sweats it all out like a fever dream. Closer “Crackin Up” crashes in as the emotional denouement proclaiming “this is the best day there is to acknowledge the pain”. It offers peace at the end of an album filled with hyperactive dirges lousy with left turns and roiling anger.
Crack Cloud’s sophomore release is the result of experience and growing pains. 2020’s Pain Olympics was a tour de force of dark, often depressive imagery, but Tough Baby refocuses as a call to action. The band doesn’t collapse under their vast creative aspirations but the album, jam packed with minute flourishes, does require your attention. Overall the tracks are uprooted from reality, torn apart and put back together in the same way the best Pavement or Bowie songs are. Tough Baby feels like a secret step in a 12 step program that invites you to feel all the rage you want to- justifiable or not. It embraces the messiness and maturity of a complete human experience and coats the whole thing in brass and yell along choruses.
