Four albums in, we’re beginning to understand what we’ll get from Bridgend’s Those Damn Crows. They’re not ready to surprise us with major tangents just yet, but God Shaped Hole sees them building on 2023’s top-three album Inhale/Exhale, honing their craft with the doughty doggedness of those in it for the long haul and already sufficiently sure of themselves to deploy their weapons with relish and gusto.
The opening seconds of the opening Dancing With The Enemy sets the tone: big, almost krautrocky guitars, Ronnie Huxford’s clattering, Stranglers-style drums and a sprinkling of grunge squall before Shane Greenhall’s Eddie Vedder-eqsue vocals seal a very appealing deal. We’re barely half a minute in and the fists-in-the-air, made-for-arenas chorus has yet to be unfurled, but already we’re in a good place.
What follows confirms what was widely suspected: these are huge songs from a band with the potential to be huge. There’s buzz-saw heaviness at the heart of all they do, but the cascading melodies of Glass Heart, the Skindred-friendly light and darkness of No Surrender (a title they might perhaps reconsider) and the controlled brooding of the hypnotic The Night Train suggest this is a band who will not allow themselves to be caught in a rut.
Meanwhile, the better-than-it-sounds Let’s Go Psycho! boasts a spoken interlude, yet more massive drums, and the sense of urgency that fuels all the better rock bands. It shares the details of a conversation between God, AI and an ordinary person (not wholly surprising, it was written after Greenhall had enjoyed an afternoon on the psychedelic drug DMT).
Most intriguing is the closing Still, which begins with Greenhall’s vocals floating over acoustic guitar. It’s their More Than Words moment, and for once they embrace the less-is-more theory as Greenhall relives a near-suicidal moment of a decade ago (‘My moral compass shows nowhere to go’). You’re waiting for the big guitars and even bigger drums to come in, but they never do, and the song is all the more powerful for it.
Still may be a curve ball, but while God Shaped Hole is a distillation of all that has gone before in Those Damn Crows’ world, the unashamedly American undertow to Dreaming and Turn It Around suggest they now feel ready to cast their net into international waters. It’s difficult to imagine there’ll be too much resistance. They’re on the right track.
