ODD CREW - ‘The Lost Pages’ (2018)

To me one of the outstanding points of life is when the right music finds you in the right moment and everything clicks in.

‘Same Old Me’ paid me a visit while I was alone driving my car through the wet backflashes of city lights in rainy and empty Sofia. It didn’t blow me away, didn’t smash me, didn’t cut my balls off. It didn’t do any of those, but it drowned in me to a certain point that a few days later I rushed out of a bathroom in a hotel room to check wtf-was-this-track-that-they-played-on-the-telly at the moment. And the goosebumps were not there because the water was cold. I just wanted more of the same. More please. Give it me. Now.

Like all things meaningful ‘The Lost Pages’ was met with controversial reactions. Amidst the sound of applauses, you could hear certain voices calling this country music for metalheads, others compared it to NICKELBACK, and some folks just went mute. Weird, because this album is amazing and it’s like Pandora’s box and it’s performing a heart surgery with each track. There’s so much authentic blues in there, that it is leading you to the Delta and is urging you to sell your soul. And you are selling it. But it is just the beginning. Nothing affected me as much as ‘Cast A Stone’ since ‘Jar Of Flies’ of ALICE IN CHAINS.

There is this ZEPPELIN mystique in ‘I’m Gone’ but it also reminds me of what Eddie Vedder did for the OST of ‘Into the Wild’. This ambience you can feel in every note played here. This tension and melancholy that looks cloudless and calm at a first glance is very deep in fact and historically justified. It goes back right to the vibe of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Waitin’ Around To Die’ and ‘Sixteen Summers, Fifteen Falls’.

Country, they said, no that’s Americana, my friends and it’s stylishly melted along with all those sophisticated and subtle gospel moments at their whitest. There’s a bit of Springsteen in here, a bit of Dylan and even something of Hendrix. It reminds me of Ricky Warwick’s solo stuff too. Songs like ‘A Dog Without A Name’ and ‘Bitterness Inside’ could not have been written by people with a superficial knowledge on music history. All the details are brilliantly executed here, and it says a lot about gut feelings and mentality.

To me ‘The Lost Pages’ is the most full-grown piece of music that ODD CREW have ever come up with so far. It’s always amazing to witness the growth of a real artist, but the most amazing thing in this case is how these guys leave themselves to be led by their intuition and the decision is always the right one. They seem to don’t care about marketing strategies and commercial suicides, they just do what they do and that brings us to the question what would be the next move for this band. Is there a way to actually do it better when you already wrote a song like ‘What I Never Was’?

ODD CREW – ‘The Lost Pages’ (2018)