Bubba Crumrine Shares Experimental New Release
How Brightly Can You Burn?, Bubba Crumrine’s twelfth solo release since 2011, finds the Ithaca avant-garde artist experimenting with melding electric and acoustic instrumentation, vacillating between gorgeous melody and discomforting, atonal noise. Shrouded in mysterious vocal howls, droning chants, and the occasional verse, Crumrine’s vocals provide a layer of accessibility to the album’s soundscapes, giving the listener a foothold amidst the avalanche of ambient pads and incessant bells and washboards. Crumrine describes the album as “the sound of transitioning from one generation to the next and the pressure, excitement, and loss that surrounds,” and listeners can feel that in the album’s meandering streams of consciousness and pensive chord choices. The atmosphere within the songs carries the tropical heaviness one feels in the cumulus stage of a thunderstorm just before lightning cracks the sky in two and heavy rains descend on a boiling and humid summer day below, bringing both relief[...]