The Crystal Teardrop - Running Out of Time/Après Jeudi (Popclaw Records)

This brace of singles from Stoke-on-Trent groovers The Crystal Teardrop echoes with the sound of a cool, poignant, and often-overlooked point in time. As the mid-sixties Summer of Love tipped over into the end of the decade Winter of Discontent, as pastel power-pop gave way to more Dionysian rock urges, as the drugs got heavier, the sounds harder, as the shot heard around the world echoed out from Altamont, signaling the arrival of the dark clouds of the seventies, music changed forever. And if you told me that these two songs were part of the music scene that heralded such a cataclysmic sonic shift, I wouldn’t have argued with you. Not one bit.

“Running Out of Time” is a song that the late, great Wayne Kramer would happily have wielded to kick out the jams and open an MC5 show with. It has the lot – stripped-back, fuzzed out, killer riffs, driving backbeat and bass lines, swirling, spiraling Hammond organs, and vocals that draw a line between late 50’s doo-wop bands and the heads down, no-nonsense, fist-in-the-air, rock, and roll that followed.

And if “Running Out of Time” tips its hat to The Motor City sound, “Après Jeudi,” by virtue of being sung in French, nods more to a sort of European, mutant garage rock that may or may not have existed. If it did and it made it to mainstream attention, this is what it should have sounded like – punchy, tribalistic beats driving frenzied guitars and manic keyboards, sizzling salvos being shot from the (ultra-hip) and brooding basslines: the momentum from which driving the whole thing over the cliff and into the abyss, and all concerned seemingly happy to make the leap of faith.

I get a lot of music under my pen each week; most of it, I consider to be work… fun work, but work nonetheless. The Crystal Teardrop, however, is a band I would happily follow around the country, gig to gig, dance like a loon to, wash their tour van, run their merch stand, organise their fan club…anything they want me to do. I’m there.

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