Crass — Stations of The Crass
“Stations Of The Crass” saw the band growing and expand the bleak year zero punk attack of their first album “The Feeding Of The Five Thousand”, to a slightly more experimental and mixed genre place. The songs here still remain taut, nihilistic and sharp, but there’s lot more variation on pace and structure from track to track, also a lot of the songs have more memorable and discernable edges to them. The album opens on a great disturbing, edgy, angered yet doomly atmospheric point with “Mother Earth” which is about Moors Murderer Myra Hindley and how the British newspapers treated the case . The track opens with a mixture of a female voice reading out bleak poetry, swirling 'n' atmospheric guitar feed back, and a male voice reading off facts about the case. After this intro we drop into the distinctive Crass sound with a mixture malevolent and wondering bass lines, taut militaristic punked drums, Steve Ignorant’s pained and angered vocals. Later on “Fun Going On” brews-up slowed down 70’s funk rock groove meets Anarcho- punkiness. Or there’s “White Punks on Hope” which starts off stomping in anchory punk mode before shifting into pogoing dub punk groove. Or we have the experimental almost gone wrong disco punk groove of “Walls” which mixers together jittering radio samples, funky bass lines and high pitch wavering punk female vocals. Though-out the album nicely keeps a good balance between spiky punk, mixed genre traits and often groovy/memorable moments. With the track lengths kept mainly between a minute and a half mark to just over the three minute mark.
The album original appeared as a double 12inch with the first three sides playing a 45 rpm and the last side playing at 33rpm. The first three sides featured 20 studio tracks, and the last side on vinyl featured a selection of 17 live tracks recorded at the Pied Bull in Islington in late summer 1979. This reissue finds the whole double album put on to a single cd, with a rather puzzling and sad modification here as the last of original live material has being dropped and replaced by five tracks from John Peel session from 1979. The original live material is meant to be available on the bands blog, but as of writing it’s still to appear- the five Peel tracks are fine in themselves and would have been great as extra, butit just seems a pity the original tracks are not here- anyway this is just a minor quibble I guess.
So on the whole this another great and (near) definitive reissue in the Crassical Collection- which will see all of the bands influential and creative back catalogue reissued over the next year or so. So the bottom is if you enjoy your punk with snarling, yet groovy with experimental edges this is a must have!