SALLY CREWE AND THE SUDDEN MOVES: Shortly After Take-Off

Sally Crewe's 2003 debut, Drive It Like You Stole It, was a charming underdog of an album, but the prominent role of stateside pals Britt Daniel and Jim Eno left some wondering how heavily its pop smarts were Spoon-fed. The Yorkshire native has since relocated to Spoon's Austin stomping grounds, recast the Sudden Moves as an autonomous combo, and, based on these results, proven that props were due to Crewe rather than her crew. Shortly After Take-Off's 13 tracks, built on Crewe's taut, spiky riffs—each clock in around two minutes—are a tad less DIY than Drive It, but no less economical. Bassist Rhodri Marsden turbocharges several with sugary-sweet backing vocals, reinforcing an early new wave vibe (think early Cars with less keyboard) not as a fashion statement, but as a means to no-bullshit songcraft. Crewe's auto jones carries over from Drive It, as evidenced by standouts "My Heart's A Motorway" and "Good Morning, Aston Martin," but her obsessions now extend to the beginnings and ends of relationships. She pins the euphoria of early infatuation on "(Don't Let Me) Talk About the Weather" (the 3:13 running time seems downright epic) with the savvy line "I wanna spend all day with you. Don't care about the night." Pure high-octane!



SHE'S NOT LIKE THE OTHER GIRLS, DAMMIT

Last night, I watched the latest episode of the now-lackluster Six Feet Under (what happened HBO? I had so much riding on you. You are going to drive me to reading, you know that, right?) and its only saving grace, the only point where I got a glimpse of complexities of love they used to mine with such gleeful and sick abandon, was the use of The Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang” over the closing credits. In that snippet there was more love and loss and pathos and everything than in the whole first two episodes of this season. And just about anything else. I love the Pretenders.

Which is an unfair way to start a review of a female fronted rock band, comparing them to The Pretenders, since, at this moment in my mind, no band is up for it. Plus it’s a sexist cop-out to compare them just on the fact that the lead singer of both groups have girl parts instead of boy parts. So forget I said anything. Sally Crewe and the Sudden Moves is a great little rock band I had the distinct pleasure of seeing perform live a few weeks back when they opened for Spoon. No punk caterwaul, no reliance of cutesy girlisms like that Lolita-meets-Snuggle Bear voice or a faux torch drone, Sally and her crew deliver great straight-up rock songs about love, leaving, and particularly – cars.

Their first self-titled album surpassed Elastica (a female fronted competitor that they soundly trounce) and even the Cars, whose classic new-wave rock sound they resemble, in car songs. Here on Shortly After Takeoff, the logical single for the record “Good Morning, Aston Martin” keeps the checkered flag flying while the excellent “Rear View Mirror” makes a sweet beautiful relationship-as-race analogy, with that new wave staccato rhythm guitar engine rumbling in the forefront, and I won’t bring up early Blondie as a reference either, dammit.

These are songs that you hear wedged in between trendy obtuse indie fodder on your local college outpost that make you sigh in relief from all that artiness and bad poetry. Sally’s voice – she’s neither diva, girl-child nor crone defying the usual categories that a woman is usually to fall into this rock world – is straightforward and upbeat, and would sound best banging out of your car stereo with the windows down. Some other pop gems on this great little hubcap are the jaunty “Game Over” and the stomper “My Heart’s a Motorway” temporarily moving her heart from behind the wheel to the asphalt. But really, there is nary a bad song in the lot. Chalk this up in the tradition of great summer albums like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and The Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication and—dammit, I was also going to say the Breeders’ Last Splash, but no- I won’t go there.



Unsettling Down
Sally Crewe and Wide Right's Leah Archibald face the uncertain future.

This just in: Grown-ups can rock and roll. Yeah, I know, you're all like, thanks for the Downing Street Memo of rock crit, boy genius; that scoop's so backdated, those of us in the know have grown too cynical to even convince disbelievers. But let's split some gray hairs: For every Neil Young flickering with ornery abandon between burn and fade, there's an AARP-load of rockers who rock less than rockingly. Some nonkids with guitars soberly exchange the transcendent drive of their youth for a more reasonable adult pacing and the nuances of musicianship. Others refuse to yield their sense of invulnerability, fronting like they can indefinitely prolong the teenage belief that all obstacles exist to be immediately overcome.

The third way betwixt senescence and shamelessness is elusive, largely because few rockers want to acknowledge the self-imposed limitations that are the essence of growing up, those distinct parameters created by specific life choices. No shock that two of the smartest adults re-examining their rock and roll prerogatives are women, a gender which, you may have noticed, often lacks the luxury to act other than one's age. Neither car-loving Brit Sally Crewe nor N.Y.C. rust-belt transplant Leah Archibald is in her dotage—the former just turned 30, though she's coy enough to write something called "Lying About My Age." Yet both work from a knowledge of how place defines who we are and how to act that's suitably grown-up yet never rules out rock values like fun and sex.

The bristly pop of Crewe's full-length debut, Drive It Like You Stole It, was intense in the taut, small-scale way you'd expect from her backup musicians, the boys from Spoon. "I've got everything to lose," Crewe sang, and on "Got a Car, Got a Job," she made that "everything" more explicit: "I've been thinking about leaving London/I've got friends in Austin/That I know/But I got a house and got a dog/Got a car and got a job/Yeah, you know." Maybe she still does, but last September, Crewe and husband Gerard Cosloy, who also happens to run her label, 12XU, relocated to Austin. On her new disc, Shortly After Take-Off, she's retained her friskiness and also shored up a tough sense of self. When a beau has the temerity to tell her, "Don't forget to phone me," on "Casino," Crewe shoots back, "I can do anything that I want/When I want/Anything, you know."

Given the leap of faith behind it, you might expect Crewe's first album to brim with the intoxication of newfound freedom and possibility. But while the owner of Paul McCartney's Aston Martin is still in love with the open road, her impulsive sexuality has smacked into a whole new means of restraint: distance. Texas is a big, broad state, after all, and even Texas is only a small part of the United States. "You're 20 minutes away/I could be there in 10," she sings on "Airport Song," deliberating whether to race out to meet a lover whose flight's been delayed—a typical dilemma on a disc where human-sized relationships are plunged into vast expanses, and characters must repeatedly leave each other behind.

With a mortgage in Brooklyn, a good job, and two kids, Leah Archibald is not going anywhere. Besides, she's already made her move; now she imagines an alternate reality in her native Buffalo so lovingly, she could almost trick herself into thinking that staying behind was an option. With Sleeping on the Couch (Poptop), Archibald's bar band once removed, Wide Right, dedicates itself to this conceptual project even more consciously than on its self-titled debut. "Dishrag" is the siren call of a spouse striving so mightily to make watching football in the garage seem as romantic as "Be My Baby" that it seduces the listener, if perhaps not the singer's mate. Yet songs like "Laws of Gravity" (working-class life sucks) bring Archibald back to earth, though even here she entrusts her blue-collar strivers with the spark of hope that Springsteen so often denies his these days. In fact, Archibald's balance between reality ("Royanne" is a mother's riposte to an opinionated guidance counselor) and fantasy ("Junior High School Dream" details Archibald's wandering eye) seems the very definition of sustainable rock and roll adulthood.

The most conscious limits that Crewe and Archibald accept are formal—both women lead bands that adhere to pretty strict conventions. But this isn't Clapton retreating into the womb of the blues, or the Stones rocking the only way they remember how. When Wide Right slam the hell out of Loretta Lynn's "The Pill"—not just the giddiest anthem of female emancipation this side of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," but the adultest anthem of female emancipation, period—they're celebrating the fertile potential that guitar-bass-drums can yield when you commit to its restrictions. As for Crewe, her first order of business after relocating was to form a new version of her band, the Sudden Moves. "When you're around," she crows on Shortly After Take-Off, "It's gonna take a big deal to bring me down." That's no declaration of invulnerability—just an acknowledgement of what it's like to feel well defended by lovers and comrades. After all, Crewe and Archibald have a world of aging ahead of them. They know better than to go it alone.



The Mechanics of Growing Older with Indie-Rock

It seemed pretty unlikely that a good song, never mind a whole album, could be written anymore about cars (Elastica's "Car Song" being the exception). It would either come across as an overly contrived nod at a classic rock 'n' roll theme or as just too simple-minded and lazy. Sally Crewe defies common sense with Drive It Like You Stole It , practically a whole album of car songs that sport a bit of Elastica's sneering sexuality with a flat admittance that some of us are getting to the age where the prospect of dropping everything and hitting the highway is becoming increasingly fraught with second thoughts.

Crewe is no Justine Frischmann, but her come-ons are surprisingly confident; she never lets on that she may doubt herself and I don't think the album would work if she did. "See me here in the kitchen getting ready to meet you / Did I catch you by surprise / Television in your eyes / Should I walk away or give you a preview" she asks on "Tonight", and the result is a sexier take on Yo La Tengo's introspective domesticity. On "Got A Car, Got A Job" you can hear the wheels turning in her head as she weighs her options: "I've been thinking about leaving London / I've got friends in Austin that I know / But I got a house and got a dog / Got a car and got a job / Yeah you know". Yeah, Sally, I do know, and the choices are never easy.

Her road metaphors are all on the surface; driving is its own reward and while a fast car might be a ticket to a better life for some, for others it's enough just to get off on the thrill of burying the speedometer. Her pleasures and preoccupations are stated so single-mindedly (even the biggest difference between being in England as compared to the United States is having to drive on the left) and with such simplicity that lyrically she could be picking up where Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place to Go" left off. Her "0-60" ("Got high on the hill now you're over") is every bit as effective as Elvis Costello's "45" at playing the age game -- even if they take different routes, with Crewe's employing considerably fewer verses -- to get to pretty much the same place.

A bit slight if you like your rock to be, you know, obviously serious, Crewe makes her songs work by playing to her strengths. The Village Voice compared her work here to the Cars' first album and that's hilariously on (the guitar line from "Friend of the City" even sounds a bit like "Best Friend's Girl"). Still, giving a quick re-listen to that particular Cars album as a point of comparison shows how much Crewe gets out of her sparse instrumentation. With Drive It Like You Stole It 's twelve songs clocking in at just over 26 minutes, and with the two best ("Wake up the Heroes" and "Got A Car, Got A Job") adding up to under three, there's little time or room for a solo to push things over the top or for one more chorus to really drive things home. She errs on the side of brevity, and while you might hope that one day she gives herself the chance to be overblown even a little, her songs hardly suffer for her musical conservatism.

Plus, she gets backup from Spoon's Jim Eno on drums and Britt Daniel on bass and piano. This could make Crewe lucky, I suppose, or good, depending on where you're looking at the situation from, but I'll take good based on the fact that Eno and Daniel don't bury her on her own album. It speaks to her understated strengths. She pushes the best parts of their contribution right up to the front and makes her decision seem painfully obvious; why else would you want the two guys from Spoon on your album anyway unless you wanted them to do what they're best at? Judging from the songs where their parts are the most distinctive (Daniel's backing vocals on "Forget It", his piano line on "Friend of the City"), she could have perhaps played up their role even more.

Crewe consciously keeps things simple; the instrumentation varies little from song to song and as a result, unless you're paying attention, much of what makes the album work is likely to slip past. Depending on your mood, the album can either zip right along or get bogged down in repetition. With the disc's slower songs ("Silver" and "Lying about My Age") faring the worst, you have to wonder about Crewe's versatility. Still, "Wake up the Heroes" is the new-wave update song that all of those East Coast kids in their skinny ties and tight jeans have been trying to write (best line: "If my car had a back seat we'd be in it") and that's not so bad.



Sally Crewe & The Sudden Moves - Drive It Like You Stole It (12XU)

Multiply Exile In Guyville by Kill The Moonlight and you'd get something a hell of a lot like Drive It Like You Stole It. Loose, immediate, and fucking Rock, Sally Crewe brings it, ably backed by a couple of regular ol' blokes, one Mr. Britt Daniel and one Mr. Jim Eno. The wait is over; this is The Summer Album, and it'll sound totally great in your car, stolen or otherwise. - ryan



Sally Crewe and the Sudden Moves "Wake Up The Heroes"

Ah, perfect rock pop music! There's almost nothing to say about this song other than that it's short, it's catchy, it has clever lyrics, and it probably sounds great on a car stereo. If you're a fan of the two most recent Spoon albums, you really ought to check this out, not just because Crewe's songwriting style is very similar to that of Britt Daniel's, but Daniel and Jim Eno also recorded the album, lending the same raw/clean recording aesthetic of those albums to her songs. For more Sally Crewe mp3s, go here. I highly recommend "Forget It."



Here in Her Car, It's the Only Way to Live
Auto-Erotic Fixation

If Sally Crewe hadn't happened, Nick Hornby would've invented her. She's like the flip side of the American alt-country singer Rob Fleming falls for in High Fidelity - Marie LaSalle, who's recently relocated to London from Austin, fleeing a bad breakup and an indifferent American audience. Sally Crewe is British, lives in London, and has a song about wanting to move to Austin. So what's stopping her? Her house, dog, car, and job - in that order. Ditching adulthood is tough once you get used to its better trappings.

Crewe is no roots-rocker, but she plays a minimalist version of the sort of classic American pop that real-life Rob Flemings insist would be the bedrock of pop radio in a perfect world. She's a big believer in the muted two-string rhythm guitar riff, that old trick beloved of new-wavers and their radio offspring. Drive It Like You Stole It has the same track-for-track radio-readiness as the Cars' own knockout debut, minus the chilliness, but Crewe isn't your best friend's girl. She's more like the indie boy's ideal of a girl who's a best friend - maybe with benefits. The one who's gonna drive you home tonight - which she promises to do on "ABC (Waiting for You)" - after some unattainable girl shatters your sensitive little heart.

Given Crewe's Texas dreams, it's no surprise that there's so much driving on Drive It . Seven of its 12 songs reference the act, often with fetishistic exactitude: stealing "an emerald green mica Jaguar" (pronounced "JAG-you-are"), "creeping past the Gatsos" (apparently a European brand of speed detector), staring at the "cat's eyes down the center line" to stay awake behind the wheel. This is more than just a pop junkie's iconographic obsession. For every celebration of making out in the backseat and blasting by the cops at "150 big-grin miles per hour," Crewe also sees cars as part of life's tedious fabric, the cause of dumb arguments with your neighbor over parking spaces. What's a kid's first driver's license, if not simultaneously a symbol of newfound adulthood and an invitation to youthful indiscretion? Does driving it like you stole it mean proceeding with caution so you don't get caught, or joyriding 'cause you'll get caught anyway?

Drive It is the rare album that grapples with the tension of growing up while staying indie - the dilemma, say, of whether to settle in London or slack in Austin. Crewe made the record with Jim Eno and Britt Daniel of Spoon, good Austin role models: Eno for his mix of lo-fi simplicity and studio clarity, and Daniel for his irony and eloquence in writing about a life of small stakes. But Crewe has good reason to stay put. She's happily married to one of indie rock's original Flemings (hint for fanzine historians: If Crewe weren't such an obvious talent, releasing this record might be a "conflict" of interest). Since he's also the man who introduced the world to Liz Phair, it's fitting that beyond the obvious similarities - a drummer-producer, that unadorned electric guitar - Drive It is like Exile in Guyville 10 years later, which I guess makes it Tattoo You . It opens with Crewe starting up her car so it'll never stop. It ends with her nervously waiting on a friend in "Lying About My Age," playing a simple piano line and multitracking her voice to keep herself company, like Phair's "Flower" without the sexual brinkmanship. Drive It is about cruising with no particular place to go, and deciding to head home.



[Translated from Italian]

Our regular readers know that we were waiting for this release for a long time from 12XU, a new label from London related to MATADOR, who had included the song FORGET IT in one of its samplers, less than two minutes of direct power pop. We really liked it and were longing for this release which kept being delayed.

But good things come to those who wait, as they say, and here it is: DRIVE IT LIKE YOU STOLE IT, the Sudden Moves debut, with Spoon's Britt Daniel and Jim Eno on bass and drums, plus our host SALLY CREWE. In less than half an hour you get 12 tracks which point straight to the brain (and the feet), a compact and well-equipped band plus the best debutant songwriter you could imagine. Sally uses gripping lyrics (what do you think of "you knew I wasn't unable/I drank you under the table") to confirm the talent anticipated in FORGET IT.

What can a bass guitar, a guitar and drums do in 2003? Ask Sally. The Sudden Moves' pop, which starts from the Modern Lovers' example and continues following the "cleaner" Cheap Trick (via ELASTICA, GARBAGE and even a bit of BLONDIE) is simple and powerful adrenalin.

Listen to this album a couple of times and you'll be addicted to tracks like ABC (WAITING FOR YOU), FRIEND OF THE CITY, 0-60, GOT A CAR, GOT A JOB, or the wonderful title-track: fresh and entertaining songs, the kind that could cause a motorway pile-up (they make you drive "like you stole it", great title, huh?).

There aren't only up-tempo tunes, though. The beauty of SILVER and above all LYING ABOUT MY AGE, a melancholic end-piece with piano played by the multi skilled Daniel, show the darker side of this girl who is able to enchant every single one of these 12 coloured pearls.

Thinking about it, it's probably a miracle due to the combination of talent and naivety: stuff that sometimes combines like nitre and glycerin and that hardly ever repeats itself. One more reason to grab this little Londoner before she becomes big.