This art-punk collective’s utopian first LP illuminates the joy, camaraderie, and compassion that can exist in even the most unforgiving, isolating circumstances.
The video for “The Next Fix”—the first single from Crack Cloud’s first LP, Pain Olympics—takes its title and subject matter at face value. In it, the Vancouver-based collective roams among an array of troubled characters trying to survive another day of squalor, violence, and sheer boredom on the streets. Their outsider existence is personified by one woman who renders her physical withdrawal as an interpretive dance, gesticulating wildly in a train station where passing commuters pay her no mind, highlighting society’s cruelest paradox: those in the most obvious need of help are so often easily ignored.
It’s a life this group knows intimately—some of its members are former addicts themselves, and they founded Crack Cloud as both a recovery tool and an artistic extension of the harm reduction and mental healthcare work they do in their East Vancouver neighborhood. As such, they use “The Next Fix” video not to deliver a PSA, but to foreground the humanity in those who’ve fallen into the spiral of substance abuse. Partway through the video (around the point where the song goes from sounding like a scratched-up 12-inch of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” to a tear-jerking, trumpet-smoothed chorale), all of its seemingly doomed subjects congregate in a park—not to score, but to laugh, dance, and frolic together in the leaves. It’s a deeply affecting denouement, illuminating the joy, camaraderie, and compassion that can exist even under the most unforgiving, isolating circumstances.
That philosophy has been the driving force behind Crack Cloud’s dramatic evolution over the past four years. Initially the solo project of singer/drummer Zach Choy, Crack Cloud has blossomed into a seven-piece band—and that’s not counting the supporting network of multi-disciplinary creatives (many of whom also work in social services) who push the collective’s membership well past the double-digit mark. And as their ranks have swelled, so too have their musical ambitions. On their first two EPs—bundled together on a self-titled 2018 compilation release for Tin Angel—Crack Cloud’s brand of post-punk leaned more heavily on the latter half of that equation, recalling the terse agitation of Wire’s Pink Flag and the disjointed rhythms of Gang of Four. But if those pioneers showed us how deconstructing rock music could serve as a metaphor for dismantling institutional power structures, Crack Cloud provide us with a glimpse of the wondrous world that awaits after the dust has cleared. Not since These New Puritans has a modern post-punk band so eagerly embraced the “post” aspect of the genre, erecting dramatic new structures atop historic foundations like the glass pyramid shooting out of the courtyard of The Louvre.
Pain Olympics includes a handy yardstick to measure just how far Crack Cloud have come in the form of “Bastard Basket,” a track that first appeared on their 2016 eponymous EP. In its primordial form, the track is a grave meditation on life and death set to an ominous circular bass riff and needling guitar pricks; the Pain Olympics version retains that rhythmic cadence, adding sustained sax drones and a ghostly vocal delivery from Choy that lend it a more absorbing, haunted intensity. However, Pain Olympics represents a substantial upgrade not just in terms of arrangements and fidelity, but vision. On the album’s astonishing opener, “Post-Truth: Birth of a Nation,” Crack Cloud resemble a typical, guitar-stabbing post-punk band for all of 44 seconds, at which point the song triggers its phantasmagoric swirl of Eno-era Talking Heads, industrial pummel, cavalry trumpets, glockenspiels, and operatic Disney-soundtrack flourishes—a fitting analog for a song that wades into the murky, chaotic waters of modern news and social-media consumption. Meanwhile, on “Favour Your Fortune,” Crack Cloud drop any pretense of being a rock band altogether, reframing their grim street narratives in a manic noise-rap banger that could pass for a Death Grips remix of a BROCKHAMPTON cut.
And yet as much as Pain Olympics deals in difficult subject matter and sensory overload, the overwhelming feeling you’re left with is, remarkably, levity. Choy can be a stern, authoritative mouthpiece as per standard post-punk practice, but he also boasts the playful flamboyance of !!!’s Nic Offer and the melodic graces of The Clash’s Mick Jones. From his seat behind the drum kit, though, Choy is less the frontman than a conduit for the band’s collective strength: the angelic group-chorus refrains of “Post-Truth” and “The Next Fix” suggest Crack Cloud’s true spiritual antecedents aren’t late-‘70s British post-punk groups, but the utopian multi-headed Canadian indie-rock collectives of the early ’00s.
However, the biggest surprise on an album loaded with them arrives with the closing “Angel Dust (Eternal Peace),” a discordant dream-pop ballad whose dying moments are overtaken by a field-recording conversation with a man espousing the therapeutic virtues of accepting Jesus. Crack Cloud may not bible-thumpers themselves, but they’ve seemingly taken this man’s most salient point to heart: “When judgment is coming around,” he says, “what’s going to be judged is the heart and the kidneys—you can’t fake the funk, man.” With their documentarian dispatches from the meanest streets, Crack Cloud could never be accused of faking it. But the strange beauty of Pain Olympics is that it fills your heart even as it’s kicking you in the kidneys.
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