So I’ll admit I’ve never much cared for the Cruxshadows. In my opinion their music is slight and hardly compelling. The lyrical content mines metaphor and mythology and is riddled with monumental cliches. As a frontman I find Rogue (ne Virgil Roger) to be irritating in both timbre and presence. His goofy posing and posturing add to the saccharine, melodramatic flair while the man’s nasally insignificant voice, while not wholy unpleasant, grates with every intonation.
But that’s just me. The Cruxshadows have sold more records than most anyone else in or around their respective genre. They are a wildly popular act with plenty of devoted fans.
The Cruxshadows are coming to town on September 17th for a show at The Varsity theater, supported by Ayria and/or I:scintilla (both are on Alfa-Matrix while CSX are on Dancing Ferret). They’ve just put out a new single called Immortal that heralds the release of a Greatest Hits package later this year. The single is one of three new tracks to be featured in the collection.
And it’s a really good song.
Yeah, I concede. I like “Immortal.” If they were looking to build up anticipation for a career-summarizing collection of songs fitted with some fresh material, they’ve succeeded handily. It begins with a minute and a half intro that showcases a standard rhythm with a dark but basic synth line. There’s some violin, as there always is, sweetening the dense mix of sounds until the vocals finally begin.
Try not to focus on the lyrics though. They’re painfully bad. In fact they’re totally incoherent. “With hearts Immortal / We stand before our lives / A soul against oblivion forever asking, ‘Why?” / This upside-down symphony in a paradox called life / Are hearts Immortal? What you give to love will never die.”
Huh?!
The song has plenty of sonic surprises throughout its six and a half minutes with a plethora of percolating electronics and uplifting melodies. There’s a condensed radio edit and extended club mix included as well. The single also has a bonus, beatless remix of “Ariadne” (from Dreamcypher) that brings to the fore lush strings and piano. The fifth and last track is a B-side called “Exile” that is a melancholic, mid-tempo affair which comes across as a little overwrought but then, considering the proclivities of Cruxshadows fans, this will be just what most were hoping for. There are some great keyboard passages at its center.
If you consider yourself an admirer of the act you should have this on order. It’s just the thing to tide you over until the Best-Of and live show. They haven’t exactly won over a convert where I’m concerned but I can certainly appreciate good work even when I find the source vexing. I may actually make an appearance at the Varsity in two months.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Wow I didn’t know about this. Cool. I’m going to have to look for this. I can’t get enough of these guys.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:48 am
yeah rouge can be alittle over the top sometimes, but he still puts on one hellofshow!
July 20th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
As a longtime fan of the Cruxshadows, I’m always excited when a new song is released. And I agree that Immortal is good, even though my heart is more wrapped around Firefly, Sophia, and Winterborn…
And to hear that they’re coming back to Minneapolis for a fourth time is excellent news. I look forward to seeing Ayria again, too.
As far as I’m concerned, the line-up for the show is well considered, being that all the acts are super high energy and put on great performances.
Now, as long as I have the time, the money, and the kid still well inside me, you can count me as one of the faces who’ll be in the crowd at the Varsity.
November 3rd, 2011 at 8:19 am
Musical tastes differ, surely, but “slight”?
As near as I can tell, Crüxshadows is the first musical group to turn Gnostic theology into wildly popular music since the Provençal troubadours followed the Cathars and Albigensians into oblivion in the 13th century.
How many rock songs have spoken bridges as “slight” as the (possibly angelic) musing in “Sophia”?
“The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty. If you wish to find that which becomes the dividing line between mankind and other biological classifications, it rests not in brain size, dominance, or even emotional capability. It lies within the innate capacity for human beings to reflect on their actions, and show regret. It is most certainly the ability to empathize that gives them their position. All mammals understand love and affection, but only man shows a propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life-form. Losing this capability, among individuals of the species, reduces them below their much heralded position, and readies the climate for the likely fall of man. A fall from grace.”
(Note that the *sung* lyrics of that song build on this premise, with the Gnostic Sophia, Light of the World, becoming the avatar for the listener to adopt compassion and self-sacrifice as a code of knightlike honor.)
November 4th, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Oh, and Christopher, there’s nothing *incoherent* about that “paradox of life” passage; it’s a comment on the completely opposed — but both true — third and fifth stanzas of the song, about whether the meanings of our lives are defined inside us or outside us (by others, especially in their memories after our deaths).
(#3) “And when my ashes scatter me with my memories to the wind
What endures beyond the silent edge is the essence found within
Have we forgotten truly who we are and what our living means?
Our purpose lies in others’ eyes and the realities that we bring”
(#5) “All that I am, and all that I dream
Lives somewhere beyond your image of me
And who I become, and what I will be
Is not yours to decide; it comes only from me”
There’s the paradox. Our memories can’t survive us, so only others’ memories can preserve what we were. But much of what we were, others never knew — it stayed inside our hearts and minds, not to held by the world. Is all that then lost forever?
Rogue resolves the quandary by answering: what you give to love will never die.