Their previous album, Inside The Rose, also resulted from a six-year gestation process. The band exists outside the current musical climate to a large degree, showing unwavering focus on the bigger artistic picture.
With Crooked Wing, their fifth and perhaps most audacious album to date, they return not with a bang, but with something stranger, subtler, and more unsettling: a deeply textured soundworld that shudders under the weight of machinery, memory, and melancholy.
Like its title suggests, Crooked Wing is an angular, asymmetrical thing, part avian grace, part metallic fracture. It opens with the sparse falsetto, delicate vibes of opener “Waiting”, a song reminiscent of “Snowflake” by Kate Bush in places, not least her chorister-voiced son Bertie, who provides her song with its stunning vocals. The softer tone is reinforced on “Bells”, twinkling piano chords, chilly organ drones, phased rhythms that shimmer like heat haze, and the detached croon of Jack’s vocals. Think of Björk’s most luminous choral rounds or Sigur Rós at their fresh glacial best.
“A Season In Hell” launches into the hip-hop rhythms that permeated much of TNP’s early output, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the opening tracks were a false dawn, but soon the sky cracks and the liturgical menace of the song opens out into a wider, more surreal sway. Like Steve Reich run through a filter of post-industrial Essex fog and post-human longing.
This is not a record that asks to be liked. It needs to be wrestled with. What’s immediately striking about Crooked Wing is its narrow but resonant palette. Organs, bells, and pitched percussion form the core of the record’s sonic architecture, and in less capable hands, this might have resulted in monotony. Instead, TNP and co-producer Graham Sutton (of Bark Psychosis fame, back behind the boards for the first time since Field of Reeds) twist these elements into a constantly shifting array of textures: ominous, romantic, and at times strangely devotional this is no more apparent tham on “Industrial Love Song” featuring Caroline Polachek.
Perhaps the record’s most disarming moment, this is a ballad of yearning wrapped in iron and steel. The lyrics lean on metaphor but never fall into pretension, and the interplay between human and mechanical voices evokes a kind of tragic ballet of inanimate romance, conceptually audacious and alluringly moving. Elsewhere, the album ranges from the bruising to the spectral. Jazz bassist Chris Laurence brings a haunted resonance to some of the more introspective cuts, grounding the more abstract passages with organic warmth. At times, the music threatens to collapse under its weight, but just when the atmosphere grows too oppressive, a melodic fragment or rhythmic lurch will jolt you back to attention.
The sense of restraint on Crooked Wing wasn’t as prevalent in the band's earlier work. It’s a record of echoes and ghosts in the machine whispering over ancient instruments. The duo metaphorically treks along ley lines of forgotten civilisations on “Wild Fields”, digs at the sublimated historical sediment of “The Old World”, and twists in the sky on the title track. The falsetto voice reappears in the closing song, “Return,” which sees their sermon fade, and you feel you’ve journeyed through something healing. A peace descends.
That said, while Crooked Wing finds These New Puritans at their most refined and fractured, the album won’t be for everyone. Its refusal to deliver easy pleasures might leave some cold. And for all its inventiveness, there are moments where the almost academic precision threatens to override the emotional core. Yet, it’s exactly what it feels like, a requiem for the mechanical age, a love song to decay, and a stark reminder of the beauty that can be found in the shadow of ruins.
