Cranes – EP Collection Volumes 1 & 2 (1997)

At the end of last year I wrote a few lines about Heart underdisco do Just Mustard who caught me by the heels in late 2022 and never let go. Well, in some moments of the text I mentioned the Cranes, in particular the voice of Alison Shaw as a point of reference to understand what that album is, and I also said that a certain Robert Smith went crazy with the Irish and called them to open concerts of Cure. Of course? Of course!

It turns out that my music-driven brain rescued from who knows where information read at any point in the last three decades: Bob Smith also freaked out on the same Cranes and invited them to tour with his band on the 92 tour, then on another one of those wonderful synapses I decided that the first post of this newborn 2023 here at PCP would be about the group of Shaw brothers, Alison and Jim. Then the doubts began.

Self-non-self? Loved? Future songs? Cranes? Some EP, as I already did with Inescapable? To a greater or lesser extent, I like absolutely everything Cranes has released to date. And there was light!

In the midst of the musical tangle that is my gray matter, I remembered a compilation released by Dedicated – the same Dedicated that put the works of Englishmen on the market until 97, the year in which that compilation came out – called objectively EP Collection Volumes 1 & 2 which brings together what I love most in the long discography of Shaw and co., their EPs.

There are a total of 26 tracks that comprise the entire history of the Cranes as part of the aforementioned Dedicated cast, from 1990 to 1997, and that, sisters and brothers, is gold. All the symbiosis between gothic shadows, dream pop trips, shoegaze distortions and the weight of industrial pinches are here; it’s one favorite after the other, from “Beach movers” to “Dance of the furies”, passing through the ‘hits’ “Inescapable”, “I hope”, “Give”, in short, here we have THE COLLECTION.

At the end of this short text, the PCP wishes all its readers a great 2023. Now press play and listen in the stem, as Cranes needs and deserves to be heard. Hold the trip!