Crazy. Pylon. DB Recs. 1983.

  Put simply, new wave was pop mass marketing geared to excite our tribal instinct for social integration. Post punk was the struggle to share cultural evidence of what remained of humanity, as Neil Young once put it, after the gold rush. Musical groups with the creative power to bring both styles together typically did so because of aesthetic inspiration; you hear in their spirited material the suggestion of spontaneity under direct pressure of an intensely held concentration. You may hear little in the way of  overtly commercial considerations but for an organic detonation of feeling that emerges from the admixture, broadening the scope of the material and, if luck holds, finding a larger audience for it.  Pylon’s Crazy, from 1983, was released at a time when the post punk music making apparatus—musicians, studio techs, listenership—began taking seriously the role of college radio in determining the course of what was fast becoming a consolidated, viable rock market. Starting with Randall Bewley’s casual guitar riff, Crazy quickly gives way to the Crowe/Lachowski rhythm section that, in the best Southern Gothic tradition, plunges into mystery and eroticism. Producers Chris Stamey and Gene Holder then introduce vocalist Vanessa Briscoe Hay, whose one word instruction to “Listen,” complicates the simplicity of the opening guitar riff by enjoining her mesmeric delivery to the rhythmic expression of a historical legacy of long held Southern secrets; Pylon was formed in the university town of Athens, Georgia. What gives Crazy such dizzying power is the band’s commitment to dynamic interplay; the rhythm section cushioning Briscoe Hay’s vocal, who then gives way to Bewley’s serpentine guitar lines that are themselves a reiteration of the lyric’s almost supernatural observation that even our most quotidian gestures might be, under certain conditions of the sublime,  mistaken for otherworldly signatures of madness. Crazy is one of those cleverly diabolical songs that hides its meanings in layers of studio finesse, a contemporaneous quality shared by R.E.M.’s first two records, and New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies. The closing of the industrial age was upon us while the new technological advancements were still in incubation, creating a kind of ephemeral, social darkness over which the policies of Reagan and Thatcher presided. The lyricism of indecipherability resonated. 

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