Crosss conjure the sound of empires crumbling—theirs is a tremorous, ominous, eerily isolating squall tailor-made for dilapidated castles rotting from mildew and overrun with vermin. The Toronto-via-Halifax trio’s sludgy psych-rock may be too alternately scabrous and cerebral to be classified as metal, unless you’re talking about the actual physical material: This stuff is leaden and impenetrable, with visible signs of rusting and corrosion.
On paper, Crosss appear to be a band that has recorded two albums, but really, they’re more like two different bands that have made four EPs. LO adheres to the dichotomous structure of 2013’s Obsidian Spectre, treating its two sides as discrete canvasses to display dramatically different paintings—one rigidly formalist, one imposingly abstract. The former sees March, bassist Ryan Allen, and drummer Nathan Doucet pushing the first album’s acidic aesthetic—whimsical, wandering Syd Barrett-like musings set atop the doomy drones of mid-'90s Earth—toward a more accelerated state of decay. Rather than try to showcase Crosss’ impressive onstage power in all its woofer-blasting glory, LO burrows deeper into the murk—on songs like "Interlocutor" and "Mind", Crosss come off like an early-'70s free-festival attraction sinking into quicksand mid-set.
Though they average out at three minutes, the tracks on LO’s first side are overstuffed with riffs that are complicated enough to be guitar solos, and melodies that swerve and circle back like a bumblebee’s flight path. But the songs are all complex in precisely the same way—nearly every one of them begins with March launching into one of his byzantine verses within the first five seconds, leaving the band little time to establish a distinct identity for each track, and despite the constant rhythmic change-ups happening underneath, the overall pace never moves beyond a lumbering lurch. (Even when March unplugs for the acoustic anomaly "Dance Down", there’s no reprieve from the album’s uniformly grim atmosphere—if anything, unfettered lines like "how can you corrupt my mind?" only enhance the pervading sense of psychosis.)
As such, the 18-minute guitar-scraped soundscape—dubbed "Enthroning the 4 Acts"—that comprises LO’s back half feels less like a free-form indulgence than a necessary break from side one’s constricting schematic, with undulating waves of feedback gradually yielding to a surprisingly affecting symphony of feedback squeals in the piece’s dying moments. But despite their seemingly oppositional intents, the two halves of LO prove oddly complementary. If LO’s shorter, melodic songs find March projecting the dark majesty of a crazed king madly circling the halls of his empty palace as the peasants outside prepare to revolt, "Enthroning the 4 Acts" is the sound of it burning to the ground.
