Various Artists - Arts & Crafts : X
- Written by David Beech
Founded in Canada in 2003, the Arts & Crafts label started as a means to self-release Broken Social Scene's seminal début You Forget It In People. Over the course of the last decade the label has expanded it's roster to include band members' side-projects and solo releases, such as those by Fiest, and then expanded further in 2005 with the signing of The Most Serene Republic. All the while the label has upheld a distinctly quaint and almost bespoke aesthetic to it's releases, claiming that the design and artwork that go in to it's releases are an extension of the artistic expression found therein.
Now, ten years on from You Forget It In People, Arts & Crafts release X, a collection of collaborations from their roster.
X sounds pretty much what you would expect an Arts & Crafts anthology to sound like. Artsy, folky, eclectic, all words that could easily be used to describe the ten tracks featured. From the moody undercurrent that runs through 'Lady Bird', itself a collaborative effort from Gold & Youth and Trust, to the hipster funk of 'Bizarre Love Triangle', that coming from Apostle Of Hustle and Zeus, each song carries with it it's own identity that ultimately plays it's own individual role in making Arts & Crafts the award winning creative entity it is.
No matter how niche and nuanced some of these tracks tend to be, there's absolutely no denying that X is a fantastic celebration of ten years' cumulative effort from musicians that genuinely do see their music as art. Tracks such as Chilly Gonzales and Stars' 'Nothing Good Comes To Those Who Wait' is a particularly good example of the blending together of two very different musical stylings; a key change midway through sees the syrupy sweetness of Stars blend effortlessly together in melancholic juxtapostion with Gonzales' brooding cynicism.
There are occasional moments of elaborate penmanship and instrumentation featured on X, which may well be enough for those unfamiliar with Arts & Crafts to dismiss them as pretentious, hipster pomposity if you will, and while I personally don't think that's the case there are certainly songs that are much more accessible than others. One such track is 'The Chauffeur' by The Hidden Cameras and Snowblink which features swirling vocal harmonies and lyricism oft only seen in the realms of prog.
While perhaps not the most radio-friendly of albums, X is most definitely a record worth spending some time with, Indeed, I doubt radio-friendly even entered the minds of those at Arts & Crafts who devised the record. Instead X maintains a distinctly individual aesthetic right the way through, and acts as a showcase for the best that the label-come-design house has to offer. There's a reason that Arts & Crafts have won numerous awards and X is that in a nutshell. Brilliant stuff.
X is out now and available from amazon