We’ve all got a past. We can either tread water and ultimately drown or swallow it down and absorb it into our blood stream. Amidst such a furious, critical process, the seasons rise and fall and clash upon each other in iron-struck blows. Senses are numbed, and there’s absolutely no conceivable way out ? allowing the metaphorical catacombs to multiply and wriggle its tentacles between layers of time. Music can be the proper healing agent, of course, unraveling the complex, stealthily-bound contraptions that serve only to confine and choke. “I can’t let go of the past,” Mad Crush‘s John Elderkin sings on essential cut “My Pre-Existing Conditions,” framed around the ongoing healthcare debate but scrawled more intimately, from the band’s self-titled debut LP, out this Friday (November 16).
Mad Crush floats between airy acoustic orbits and is greatly indebted to Elderkin’s various romantic entanglements through the years, as well as previous work with The Popes, on a rock opera with another band called ¡Moonbeams No Mas! and on a sequel to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust record. “Having pulled that off, I decided to try the equivalent of an ongoing Netflix or HBO show, focused on the same main characters over time,” Elderkin tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the album in-full today. “I’d been listening to a lot of June Carter, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons, and that was my jumping-off point with the songs and stories. Now, Joanna and I are like characters that I try to place in new situations as I write new songs.”….READ MORE