At the dawn of the 90s, post-hardcore quartet Crain joined their peers Slint and Rodan as a crucial component of the era's great Louisville musical diaspora, a movement whose ripples across the rock underground still reverberate to this day. Originally released in an LP-only edition of 1,000, the group's debut album Speed has, despite its scarcity, remained one of the quintessential documents of the scene. And now, packed with four previously unreleased bonus tracks, this handsome new reissue illustrates that the intervening years have done little to diminish this music's pulverizing force.
With their complex song structures and dynamic rhythms, Crain bore enough resemblance to their local contemporaries to secure the always-irksome math rock tag, but in truth their sound was significantly heavier and more visceral than that vague categorization usually implies. Produced with typical unvarnished ferocity by Steve Albini, Speed is a merciless pummel from beginning to end, its brutally precise, thickly-coated riffs delivered with just enough melodic guile to lure the weary listener back inside for further exposure.
At the time of Speed's recording, Crain consisted of vocalist/guitarist Joey Mudd, bassist Jon Cook, guitarist Tim Furnish, and drummer Will Chatham. (An early version of the group featured future Matmos maverick and Pitchfork wag Drew Daniel on vocals.) On the group's best tracks, such as the opening "Car Crash Decisions", the locomotive "Proposed Production", or the drag-strip ready "King Octane" the quartet function as a unit of almost-perfect cohesion, cornering their battleship riffs as though on rails. Each instrument is given equal weight in Albini's bracing 8-track mix, and each player proves capable of shouldering his share, although Mudd's abrasive, tormented screams are often unable to fully surface above the guitars' black, choppy waves.
It's never easy to accurately gauge what influence a particular album has truly had, especially one with such a limited initial release. Suffice it to say, however, that at the very least Speed was eerily prescient in anticipating much of the subsequent work of such acts as Helmet, Jawbox and Drive Like Jehu. One could even make the argument that just maybe Albini took a few of Crain's best ideas along with him to Shellac, although naysayers would probably be just as quick to point out Crain's debts to Big Black. At any rate, fans of nervy, aggressive post-punk thud should find plenty to celebrate in this reissue, enough to hopefully spread Speed's influence even further into the future.
