On their second album, the Brooklyn quartet sinks deeper into their dread-filled chill-out sound, but they become sharper and more focused in the process.
On their 2019 debut, Jinx, Crumb slowly lowered dazed psych-rock into a loungey abyss, evoking the feeling of one long summer day spent entirely inside the endless buzz of an anxious mind. It was unnerving and terrific. Before forming at college in Boston, the Brooklyn-based quartet honed their chops in low-profile jazz, soul, and rock groups. After a couple EPs, they flourished in the softly lit chasm of their debut—now Ice Melt captures a band breaking free of the trance for little more clarity.
Even at its most blasé, Crumb’s music can sometimes feel, well, dreadful. “Trophy” calls to mind sudden vertigo that won’t shift. “Ice Melt” captures the singular unease of coming up in a bad frame of mind. Crumb have distanced themselves from being a band that makes music that simply wafts in and out of the room on a lazy afternoon (“I wouldn't want to chill to our music,” singer-guitarist Lila Ramani told Pitchfork in 2019). Highlights here like “Up and Down,” a helter-skelter of slinking arpeggios with hat-tips to the golden era of trip-hop, support the position. Beyond a general air of cosmic longing, aided by violinist Maeve Feinberg on songs including “Gone,” Crumb zone in on the low-key doom they have always dabbled in.
With Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado co-producing, Ice Melt pushes the band forward with more lucidity and more manipulated space. While the thrashing, high-gain climax of “Tunnel” sounds like a band briefly weary of nuance, the empty drift between “Seeds” and “L.A.” feels like forever. Speaking to Rolling Stone, bassist Jesse Brotter revealed one of the more curious advances: “We’d take a microphone, put a condom on it, put that in a bucket filled with water, and then play a sound source at the water, so you would get a slight underwater effect that you could merge it with the original sound source.” The punch-drunk panning of Bri Aronow’s synth work on “Gone” and “Up & Down” sounds like an obvious success story here. Paired with Ramani’s phaser-doused shapes, they sit like swells of seafoam in the mix.
As the band’s main songwriter, Ramani has always threaded Crumb’s songs with oblique impressions akin to an interior monologue when people-watching. On Ice Melt, whether loosely riffing on belonging (“Retreat!”) or characterizing strawberry seeds as shoes on her feet (“BNR”), she continues to grasp the power of ambiguity, while offering a reminder that simply being a human in the world can feel just as unknowable. Occasionally, though, outliers such as “Gone” buck the trend: “Ma rolls in the waves/She wants someone to save her/Says she used to be a beauty/Then they took her soul/So far away from here.” She cryptically referred to her family on Jinx highlight “Faces” (“All of my heroes are people I know”), but by directly evoking her artist mother, Ramani pushes biographical detail through a haze of sleepy non-sequiturs.
According to Brotter, the hallucinatory scenes that made up Jinx stemmed from a collective exploration of “loss and fate and some other myth around the band.” Even at its most hope-sapped, Ice Melt sounds like four old college friends brightening the corners of their twilit sound. By refining their reality, and allowing themselves to be a little more seen, they feel more reachable than ever.
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