crane your swan neck

Madison, WI outfit Crane Your Swan Neck graced the stage for this evening’s Onion Area Band Tuesdays. Running the gamut from solo-acoustic to tambourine-shaking rock and roll, CYSN offered up mish-mash of genres that worked surprisingly well together.

Frontman Randall has made the rounds on the Madison music scene for years, and it’s no wonder why. His voice is that of a grizzled old troubadour hiding under a glossy indie-rock patina. Commanding the stage despite his soft-spoken manner, Randall delivers an engaging performance without the image of pomp and preening his mustachioed visage may evoke.

Of course, Randall isn’t the only thing to make CYSN worth seeing – without the group of multi-instrumentalists with whom he shares the stage, he’d be just another singer-songwriter. Incorporating accordion, violin, clarinet, and keys into the standard rock set-up, Crane Your Swan Neck often has an appealing Eastern European flair about it. The band is at their strongest when taking this musical approach, though more standard fare like “Please Keep These Angels Away” and “Build Me Up” is rather pleasing as well.

The band will be taking a short hiatus, but will return to live performances at the Forward Music Festival in September. - mix tapes heartbreaks

Pale Young Gentlemen have already made Madison safe for the dramatic, cabaret-influenced indie-rock and gypsy punk that swamped Brooklyn several years back. Consequently, the materials that make up this song by Crane Your Swan Neck -- a melancholy accordion drawn from a 19th Century dancehall, a dirge-like Tom Waits-style beat, and an elastic-voiced swain pleading his case most pathetically as he rearranges the marbles in his mouth -- aren’t going to surprise anyone hereabouts. But the quality of the writing, playing and particularly the arranging on this demo version of “On Landmines” might.

The fairly new Madison band’s singer/prime mover Randall Luecke could have encouraged his music-making mates to pump up every bar with gypsy violin and all manner of odd keyed instruments, valorizing aural exoticism over every other aspect of the tune. But fortunately he doesn’t do that.

Yes, the confused swain he plays is a stock character. On the other hand, Luecke manages to make the youthful solipsist work by oozing through a loopy sonic pub crawl that stutters and reels like a drunk at the end of a week-long bender.

No doubt some listeners will long for a little less tension and a lot more release. But Luecke’s purpose here isn’t to provide a pleasant love song that wraps everything up in a bright red bow just before the final drumbeat is hit. Instead, he means to envelope us in the poisonous vapors of a tortured mind, and he accomplishes that goal quite craftily.

An MP3 of the track is available in the related downloads at right. More songs by the band can be listened to on its MySpace page. Crane Your Swan Neck has a pair of upcoming performances in the next week, the first on Friday, June 20 at The Owl House followed by another on Wednesday, June 25 when they open for Frog Eyes at The Project Lodge. More shows follow in July and August at The Frequency. - Isthmus magazine

As I sat to write about this track in the context of Randall's appearance tonight at Madison's The Project Lodge, I was stuck by how poignantly the song projects onto Bourcart's commentary about the domestic American relationship to the daily plight of soldiers and innocent civilians in Iraq. Randall's voice moans raw and urgent in a sterile Midwest. In this desolate night his prospects are looking bleak, he's in too deep. He's crossed a line. But he is trying to tell you, he's caused pain and his regretful carcass aches. - www.justsayinisall.com

"Relatively new local band CYSN tends to rustle up a slightly different lineup for each show, at times folding violin, bass, keys, clarinet, accordian, and drums into pleasingly raggedy tunes that channel folk, country, and eastern european isounds. Singer and songwriter Randall Luecke can come off as a bit tricky at first, but under that he sounds like a bruised romantic, and letting that stuff out often proves unexpectedly fun."


- onion AV club