Two White Cranes is the alias of Roxy Brennan, a singer-songwriter from Bristol. Brennan has previously played in bands such as The Mountain Parade and Roxanne: The Early Years, but Two White Cranes is her attempt to forge ahead on her own (with help form some friends). The name is based on these cranes, as opposed to these cranes, which may be surprising for someone who falls into that catch-all umbrella term of folk. Anyway, Brennan has recently released a self-titled album and it’s really good. She says on her blog that the album is comprised of songs “about loving someone or something.” Love songs then, but perhaps love songs with a little more depth than you’re used to.
The album opens with ‘walls’, which uses bursts of clamour to punctuate what is otherwise a sweet and restrained song self-doubt. This sort of quiet-loud-quiet dynamic, the sense that Brennan is struggling to keep a lid on a whole bunch of noise, appears throughout the album and serves as a neat sonic metaphor for the swells of worry that sometimes affect us all. Even the quieter tracks like ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ and ‘Skeleton’ have staccato spikes in volume and feeling, be it in her voice or the instrumentation, and you get the feeling that the songs are keyed in to her inner rhythm, not rehearsed into flat routines but fresh and raw and alive.
While Two White Cranes will draw comparisons to acts like Emmy the Great, these peaks hint at another side, something deeper and darker and real. This manifests most clearly on ‘Mountainside’, a short and weird song that sounds a lot more abstract and experimental than the other songs. “They found a whale,” she sings, “they found the body of a whale on a mountainside.” This mantra is backed by the striking of a guitar and is repeated with minimal changes, the intensity ebbing and flowing to exacerbate the disconcerting feel. The track suggests that, far from being a homely painted-by-numbers folk singer, Brennan has multiple paths open to her. We for one would love to see which she chooses next.
You can buy the album now from the Two White Cranes Bandcamp page on a pay-what-you-can basis.