You’re not going to put this album in your car stereo and rock out with the windows down so that everyone can hear just how cool you are. Don’t think you’ll go retro and wow the fine young ladies at the roller rink with your double knotted skates and smooth spins to the pop sounds of the latest Fischoff offering. Don’t take this album to the beach or upload it to an Ipod. I don’t know in what context you can naturally listen to this album, but I do know that when you do, you’ll be intrigued.

The Crawl is the speed of time passing, and as you’d expect, the seasons of the year as well as the seasons of a human lifetime both feature prominently. The catch is that while the world outside seems to flit by, the suffocating sense of the narrator’s own time grinding by at a glacial pace invokes a dense package of indelible images drowning under a maelstrom of unrelated sounds. Moments freeze and are crystallized by Fischoff’s well-chosen words, while the hard pellets of synthesized beats skip around them like sleet clicking against an apartment window five floors up. The world continues its dance of futility as seen through the birds coldly observed on their branches, the steel and concrete of the city below populated with bodies moving about in a cloud of noise without ever saying one discernable thing to one another.

This is an album about a molasses-slow love which can never congeal. A simple attempt to connect is approached from so many different angles through a tireless persistence, that when that love is never completely realized, the listener, paradoxically, feels nothing. Fischoff buries his unique vision (“We sat on rooftops/We looked at birds/Their tender bodies/Echoed our words”) under a blizzard of cymbals and a rush of organ which has the oddly uninspiring effect of detaching the listener from what would otherwise be emotional epiphanies: “And when the night came/The sound I heard/Was of you breathing so sweetly/As you slipped inside a dream/But now something has changed/And your breath just sounds strange/When you lie here next to me”

The Crawl’s 10 tracks rely on a recurring theme: a fervent, almost desperate need to connect to others, which ends in apathetic abandon. The narrator perceives the happenings of “life” all around, and he knows that he should feel something for these beautiful happenings in this strange world and the other characters that fill it, but he simply cannot.

“We hover and cast out/Whispered nets of words/To pull each other in.”

As a listener, you’ll find yourself perturbed by the quality of such an interesting voice collapsing under the weight of so much extra noise, you almost want to blurt out: “Don’t be bashful, Mr. Fischoff. Come a little closer. Please. For God’s sake, your lyrics are inventive, and your voice has a smoked out, nearly tracheotomy quality to it that is at once unnerving, and almost frightening.” What would happen were we to strip down the frozen layers of vocals to just your voice, untreated, without the effects?

Then, sometime after the album has reached its midpoint, David shows us what he’s got. He manages to raise his head above the ululating layers of synth and dubbed down snare to give us the voice we’ve waited to hear. And it’s just plain unloveable. And it reminds you of yourself singing in the shower getting over a bad cold. And you love it for it’s unabashed imperfection. Then he sinks again, below the noise while whispering about those moments imperfectly punctuated with stuttering beats.

For all of its fine cohesion, and for all of the consistency and ingenuity in creating a wholly unique soundscape, this album is an egg-timer counting down the seconds until an unseasonably cold winter ends.. Shovel as we might, we won’t be able to crack the cool exterior of its first layer. To further distance the listener, Fischoff piles one frozen layer atop another, until you’re left with something akin to the gush of a white-noise machine. This is not an inviting album. In fact the music and tone itself are shiver-worthy. Electronic blips that will get David comparisons to the Postal Service while the oft-overlooked and undermentioned Autechre should be credited with giving him the alphabet to fashion the words of this musical language.

The Crawl has brilliantly involved its listeners in a collection of heady, cerebral scenes, which have distanced themselves from their own emotional core, like a man standing above the once-warm sheets tousled on a bed half-empty. The Crawl is your own exposed skin, chapped from winter, deadening, layer by thin layer, without the warmth of another.

I challenge anyone to state it more eloquently, more originally than Fischoff himself has: “And the sun burns off a dream/From the surface of my sleep/All the images my eye clutches/To keep sift out of my view/Leaving only time turning its screw into a day that’s daring me to move.”

Dave Fischoff Official Site
Secretly Canadian Official Site