Great pop music, once argued musician and journalist Bob Stanley, comes from “tension, opposition, progress, and fear of progress.” For Sydney’s jangly trio Crane Games, it also comes from being great mates and awesome human beings too.
Forecast is Crane Games’ debut EP, an unabashedly upbeat 4-track record from a band that describes their music as “full hearted DIY pop”. The three-piece, Mike, Mia and Will, share vocal duties, as they ride the exuberant highs of guitar solos between the dysfunctions and sentiments of modern life.
Structured around the group’s penchant for sweet riffs, “Four Day Week” questions our bind to the status quo of work. While dreamy pop song “Ominous” forecasts an impending and ambiguously dystopian future, with lyrics like “Because the forecast tells us it’s only the start / And the forecast tells me we ain’t gonna last.”
“There’s a common thread among the collection of songs – each of them has some theme or reference to the future,” explains Mike, Crane Games’ guitarist and vocalist. “In your mid to late twenties, maybe you start thinking about that a bit more. Or maybe anxiety about the future is just part and parcel of the times we live in.”
Balanced precariously between curiosity and cynicism, head-bopping idealism and an anxious sense of realism, it’s the stasis that breeds Crane Games’ addictive pop melodies. Through its melancholic outlook on our current zeitgeist, what shines most though is an earnest charm of mates making music together. Tracks such as “Bad Weather”, simply retells a story of a shared experience. “Bad Weather predates the band by about 5 years. We wrote it in the living room of Mia’s old sharehouse in the aftermath of a giant storm, the lights were out and there was water in the walls.”
Bona fide in their enthusiasm and openness to go all in with their crystalline lyrics and anthemic strums, Forecast gives listeners so much to love about Crane Games.
Treat yourself to the colourful artwork and music of the Forecast EP on vinyl through Crane Games’ Bandcamp, or stream the tracks on Spotify.