Crime In Stereo - "House & Trance" LP

It’s been 13 years since the last Crime In Stereo record. Indeed, House & Trance feels like the natural next step for Crime In Stereo. It was entirely self-produced by the band (outside of it, both Romnes and Cioni are acclaimed and accomplished producers, which made doing it themselves much easier), and flows on so well from their past that it’s almost like the intervening decade and a bit hasn’t happened, that this is actually parallel universe circa 2012 where band didn’t actually call it a day (however briefly) or stop writing new music. At the same time, it’s also very much a record that couldn’t exist had all those years not happened, had the world not taken a turn down an even darker path than it was already on. Recorded, often in bursts of spontaneous improvisation, at both Romnes’ and Cioni’s studios—The Barber Shop in Hopatcong, NJ and Sound Acres in Woodbridge, NJ, respectively—and then finished at a studio Fairchild (who owns a pro audio company responsible for the NYC Marathon and NYC SummerStage series) purpose-built in his apartment, these songs not only sound sonically incredible, but are riddled with the anguish of life and existence in 2023, both musically and lyrically. They’re not just reflective of these times—the effects of late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism, the encroaching dominance of fascism within the US political system, the increasing alienation and isolation that comes from the purposeful eradication of community by corporate politics—but of the immense human collateral damage that comes with all of that.