Rob Crow: ''Living Well''

Rob Crow's tale, far from over, is filled with many visions and a small group of friends and collaborators working in obscurity for years. My Room Is A Mess, Crow's third solo album and first in seven years, shows an artist, still struggling but no longer starving, and very much in command of his skills.

The other hardest working man in show business made his debut in the mid-1990?s fronting the Encinitas, CA (a suburb of San Diego) band Heavy Vegetable. The band featured Crow?s signature songwriting style, a unique blend of experimental rhythms, phrasing and time changes (which bears similarity to what critics would later refer to as math-rock or post-rock) all held together by a strong and innovative pop backbone (which resembles nothing), embodied in the duelling vocals of Crow and singer Elea Tenuta. San Diego failed to become the next Seattle as promised and the band broke-up, leaving behind two albums and a posthumous collection and a small, fanatical group of fans worldwide.

Somewhere along the way, Rob Crow paired up with obscure keyboard enthusiast Pea Hix and the duo formed Optiganally Yours, blending musical theater, bubblegum pop, Shooby Taylor-esque scatting and snappy old keyboards. This unique approach earned them fans as diverse as Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and Craig McCracken, creator of the Powerpuff Girls (who then invited the band to contribute a song to the show?s soundtrack CD). Optiganally Yours have two albums, a remix EP and a new album, OY in Hi-Fi, due out on AKR in the near future.

Crow and Tenuta later resurfaced together with a rotating rhythm section as Thingy, very clearly the logical evolution to what they?d been doing with Heavy Vegetable, and released an EP and two albums (the second of which, To the Innocent, won them $40,000 in tour support from a dot.com contest) before breaking up in 2002 with a posthumous third album in the works.

In 1999, Rob Crow starting working with AB Smith IV of Three Mile Pilot on a new band called Pinback. Pinback?s sound paired Crow's hooks with Smith's even-tempo rhythms and combined the vocal styles of both to produce compelling results. This is where everyone else got on the boat. Their two full-length albums are each approaching 30,000 copies sold in the U.S. alone. They released a CDEP, Offcell, in 2003 on Absolutely Kosher and their latest full length, Summer in Abaddon, was recently released in 2004 byTouch and Go. NME called Crow's work Real rock revolution! back in 1997 and it's taken this long for everyone else to catch on.

Over the years, he?s been a regular member of the sonically stunning Physics and the newer hardcore outfit Alpha Males, released unusual concept records (Fantasy Mission Force, Snotnose) and is currently recording the debut of his Sabbath-metal inspired band Goblin Cock and dreaming of the post-Thingy outfit Advertising. The term prolific doesn?t even begin to do the man justice.

There have been two solo efforts prior to My Room Is A Mess, but they're almost incomparable to the new album, save the inspiration behind them all. The 1995 split with Tigerbeat 6 poster boy Lesser (then relishing in his own noisy obscurity on San Diego's Vinyl Communication label) and the 1996 Lactose Adept are both low fidelity, primitive affairs. Though the new album was recorded entirely in Crow's bedroom, technology has come a long way in seven years. So has Rob Crow.

Lacking the genre-specific (self-imposed) boundaries of his many other musical endeavors, My Room Is A Mess finds Crow stretching in all directions, stamping his unique signature on boy band pop (Never Alone), death metal (Jedi Outcast) and new wave (Helicopter), as well as the experimental pop for which he's best known. The album contains some of the catchiest material he's ever written (Some Things, A Subtle Kiss). The combination of the bizarre and the familiar, the obscure and the accessible, is a veritable mantra for Rob Crow. The Sunday London Times put this juxtaposition succinctly: Crow seems alone among contemporary experimental artists in that he still cares about constructing beautiful melodies, rather than just making a gruesome display of their bones. The zine Etch adds insightfully: The most complex lyrical ideas hide behind the simplest language and symbols. Like the kind that show up in dreams.