Collected Songs

Collected Songs pulls together material recorded between 1995 and 1998 by the Crescent quartet line-up. The dub-wise instrumentals of its predecessor, Electronic Sound Constructions, have transmuted here into musky, hypnagogic not-rock and not-folk songs – it’s perhaps the most introverted album Crescent released, with songs constantly hovering on the brink of dissolution, lost in pools of dark, droning keyboards that spill out of the speakers like dense passages of mud. Matt Jones’s voice rarely raises itself above a monotone mumble, but that works for the material on Collected Songs, which hangs together like a rumour, or a half-understood prophecy. Even with a closing, feedback-drenched blowout, “This World Is Not Our Home”, it’s sublime in its recalcitrance.