Knowingly or not, Crying saddled themselves with a lot of baggage when they first formed at SUNY Purchase in 2013. Early in the New York indie rock trio’s existence, guitarist Ryan Galloway took to programming synthesizer lines derived from old Game Boy software, which led many to understand them as a chiptune act. But then their name, and later their association with the Boston label Run For Cover records (“There are a lot of sad men,” Galloway said of the label in a recent interview with Village Voice) have led others to call them an emo band. Neither term is particularly damning in 2016, and they were accurate on some level, at least insomuch as the EPs Get Olde and Second Wind had their moments of sullen introspection and sugar-rush abandon.
But their debut LP, Beyond the Fleeting Gales, is different, folding the big-screen bombast of mainstream '80s rock into their sound. Toting a whole gleaming new set of synthesizers and some surprisingly complicated riffing, Gales transforms the band completely. The experience is sort of like catching a show you used to watch on a CRTV in high def for the first time. Despite the stadium-sized scale of Galloway’s thunderstruck riffs on songs like “Patriot,” a subtlety that was once elided creeps to the forefront. If nothing else, it’s a treat to hear his legato runs sounding more like “Guitar Hero” than the bit-crushed rhythm violence of their older works.
It’s a metamorphosis that’s folded into the lyrics of the record. Even the opening track “Premonitory Dream” seems to acknowledge the shock of personal transformation. Over vaporous synth pads and a guitar riff as hair-raising as anything between Rivers Cuomo and Eddie Van Halen, singer Elaiza Santos finds herself on pausing on the middle of a shoddily constructed bridge, unsure whether to go forward or back. She mulls the “risk of burdening the wood and rope I’d already passed,” and ultimately decides to press on. The ascendant riff takes off once she’s made her decision. This is music meant to soundtrack the delicate process of figuring out who you are in relation to the world around you. Openness, in this case and throughout the record, is rewarded; pushing forward is met with joy.
"There Was a Door” was released as a single on National Coming Out Day and the song is a sort of public affirmation of the self, punctuated in pitch-shifted guitar licks. Like their fellow New York riff-slingers PWR BTTM, their music can occasionally be read as a playful, grinning inversion of the hetero-masculinity that’s often baked into these sorts of guitar fireworks—a surprisingly-radical suggestion that a sweep-picked guitar solo can be for everyone, not just for oversexed cis dudes with big hair.
Beyond the Fleeting Gales is a record about these simple victories, and surprising moments of optimism reclaiming simple pleasures and pressing on in the face of an oppressive world. That’s the message at the heart of “There Was a Door.” You face a threshold; cross through and there’s peace, maybe, or at least something worth singing about.
