Long Island progressive post hardcore rockers CRASH THE CALM are premiering their third and final video in a special series launched on IDIOTEQ back in July, and we’re stoked to give you the first airing of the cinematic visualizer above! Serving as the direct follow-up to “The Night That St. Catherine Fell“, “No Deeper Than a Coffin” is about letting go of the failures you define yourself with. Itโs recognizing that you have more power than anyone else to change your surroundings and circumstances. Defining your own idea of happiness based on something from the past will just erode you away.
The band’s new release “A Town Named Nowhere: Volume III” is about making peace with the present. As the dust settles, there are glimmers of hope and opportunity. Itโs a chance for Clifford to begin anew and walk away from the nightmares that have been plaguing him. Clifford can still write his own ending, all thatโs left is to try.
Crash the Calm – “A Town Named Nowhere” concept
The year is 1930. A candle is lit in church to illuminate the choirโs sheet music. The candle gets knocked over, the church burns to the ground with a woman inside, and along with it a town withers as massive sky-blackening storms threaten to swallow the earth whole. The inhabitants barely hang onto hope, wondering if the God theyโve been praying to has turned its back on them and left them behind… Welcome to A Town Named Nowhere.
On first glance, the Dust Bowl might as well be a galaxy away from 21st-century Long Island, New York. And if this milieu, immortalized in the work of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, seems like an incongruous setting for an album by a band with post-hardcore roots, Crash The Calm is poised to remind us that time and space can only contain the imagination as much as one allows. A Town Named Nowhere, the Long Island quintetโs new full-length album, transports the listener to the drought-stricken Southwest of the 1930s with an all-consuming vividness that rivals the scope of an epic period-piece film or great literary classic.
Pushing far beyond conventional notions of the โconcept albumโ as we know it, Crash The Calm captures timeless, universal struggleโbetween humankind and nature, between people and each other, between the individual and oneโs own conscience, between grief and perseveranceโwithin a musically sumptuous diorama thatโs as lavishly constructed as the storyline co-founding guitarists Brian Dowling and Pat Smith scripted to serve as the musicโs foundation.
Over a series of peaks and valleys that do the post-hardcore tradition proud while pointing to its future, A Town Named Nowhere centers on the conflict between Cliffordโhusband-survivor of Eleanor, who perished in the blaze of St. Catherineโsโand the church pastorโEleanorโs father who is himself no stranger to loss, having survived the death of his wife in the Spanish flu epidemic years prior.
A self-described โhistory nerd,โ Dowling was inspired by the feeling that the โsoil that weโd planted underneath our feet had just gone deadโ when he and Smith found themselves holding the reins after the bandโs other three members had to part ways in 2018. And, in a bold artistic move that gives you a sense of what makes Crash The Calm tick, Smith and Dowling responded to the biggest challenge theyโd ever faced as a band by aiming for an achievement more musically ambitious than theyโd ever tried.
What better, then, than taking-on one of the biggest catastrophes in American history? As if that wasnโt enough, Dowling and Smith decided to tell the story from an authorโs perspective, with a rich tapestry of townspeople all taking turns as narrator at various points throughout the songs.
Indeed, with A Town Named Nowhere, Crash The Calm hasn’t merely brought a fictitious town to life, but instead created an entire world out of sound. The insistent, chiming guitars that close-out โDevils,โ for example, are as ominous as the visual of church bells ringing out across a desolated landscape. The songs, grouped together into three โchaptersโ of the story, cover vast musical terrain, from the mournful slow-burn of โThe Night St. Catherineโs Fellโ to the oddly dour and anthemic โMy Nowhere,โ to the recurring shout-along chorus of โWe all / we all / come from nothing and nowhereโ to the brilliant, unexpected twist the band puts on pop-punk at the very end with album closer โPast and Present.โ
โOne of the main themes of the whole album,โ Smith explains, โis losing everything and re-growing from nothing, which is where we drew this idea of โnowhere,โ where everything is destroyed and everything is gone. Itโs all about the battle to overcome that barren-ness and re-growing new life. It was really important to us to drive that aspect home.โ
Adds Dowling: โLife moves on whether youโre onboard or not. Eventually, new things just grow around whatever was lost.โ
โOf course,โ Smith continues, โwe went through it as a band first. We felt like our whole world was caving in on itself, but then we found ourselves in a situation where practically everyone on earth was able to relate in this much bigger, more dramatic way, and all of a sudden the music made sense on a scale we hadnโt imagined.โ
โPandemic aside,โ Dowling offers, โthereโs always going to be something, some kind of upheaval thatโs going to make you feel this way. Iโve looked a lot at history, which of course has all these cycles of destruction, but this happens in everyoneโs life. It could be something that looks totally ordinary on paper, like a job changeโif you think about it, it was just the idea of our careers in music being over that put us in this really apocalyptic frame of mindโor it could be a real-life catastrophe. And if things are getting back to normal for you after all the recent upheaval, guess what? Thereโs something else around the corner.โ
โWe donโt say that to be pessimistic,โ says Smith. โWe say that as a reminder that there is still light through the darkness. The world we created in A Town Named Nowhere is incredibly bleak, but thereโs also a ton of beauty in there too. I mean, I canโt imagine the strength people had to have to get through the Dust Bowl, how serious they had to be about living. Thatโs incredibly inspiring to us. So we wanted to make sure that was all there in the musicโthe bleakness, the beauty, the willpower. I mean, before we faced our biggest challenge as a band, we couldnโt have imagined that we would put something out with this many colors. It took something like that to bring it out of us.โ
Imagine the brooding, introspective sprawl of millennial classics like Circa Surviveโs Juturna or Thriceโs The Alchemy Index crossed with the songcraft and grandeur of The Wall and thatโll give you some sense for the kind of journey A Town Named Nowhere takes you on. And, since weโre not talking about a band that cuts corners here, the album will be packaged as a trilogy of EPs, each released separately with its own artwork and all adding up to form a handsome showpiece for the physical representation of the album in full.
In addition to the visually stunning short film that serves as the video for โDevils,โ listeners will also be able to take an immersive dive into Nowhere via the albumโs namesake video game.
Built on Epicโs Unreal Engine 4, the game will be available for PC/Mac and downloadable on Steam and the bandโs Website. Enter the town and search for various relics of Nowhere before the dust storms engulf you; clues from the record help guide the way.
๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐กโ๐ ๐ ๐๐ข๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐โ๐๐ ๐ก๐ , ๐กโ๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐กโ๐๐ก ๐๐๐๐๐๐โฆ
Find the newest single from CRASH THE CALM with loads of other newer and classic rock earworms in our ROCK Spotify Playlist:
