CRYBABY
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JOE VOLK
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Crybaby make music for grown-ups, music for those amongst us who know that both pain and pleasure can be brutal but temporary, so you should hang onto their redemptive and restorative power as long as you can.
The first single, I Cherish The Heartbreak More Than The Love That I Lost (released 19th March) is a love song to heartbreak, and a statement of intent for the album as a whole. What Am I Supposed To Do Without You Now? takes the view of a lover turned carer in a relationship with a dementia sufferer. A Misery Of Love tackles the problem arising when two people find themselves stuck together through circumstance or fear of change and the resentment that can create, while When The Lights Go Out is about saying goodbye to someone close and finding solace in your memories when they’ve gone. Crybaby’s songs look at the devices and tools we use to gain the upper hand in relationships, how we cope with the presence – and the loss – of others, and they do all that in a wonderful, moving sort of way we can all understand.
Bristol’s Danny Coughlan is from a large, musical Irish family and being a musician was his only ambition from an early age – school, was, “at best utterly dull and at worst terrifying.” As the years went on Danny would make music under many guises, from a heavy metal band at school to a sharply dressed mod-soul band Babel, who were signed to Acid Jazz offshoot People Tree. However, it wasn’t until November 2010 when Danny, paying the bills by working on a building site, bought a 4-track tape machine on eBay and began to write a load of new songs that drew on all the records he’s loved since childhood.
His demos came to the attention of Helium Records who put Danny in the studio with Merrick (Chris Hughes) from Adam & The Ants, who plays drums on several songs and co-produced the record with Mark Frith. What emerged from the sessions was Crybaby proper. Named after Garnet Mimms’ Cry Baby – one of the truly seminal songs in the development of soul music, it was famously covered by Janis Joplin – the name also references the John Waters film and hints at that peculiarly lachrymose strain of early 60s RnB. The resulting self-titled album is a collection of blissfully spare, fully focussed pieces propelled by dramatic imagery and gripping melody.
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