I picked up a friend’s sketchpad recently, just to flip through the different artwork he was working on.
“Is this yours?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah,” my friend shrugged somewhat uncomfortably. “You could take a look, I guess. It’s all rough sketches and stuff. Like, nothing’s finished yet.”
A week before, I found myself in a dorm room many floors above mine. My friend picked up a sketchpad and began furiously flipping through it. As if a sixth sense had struck her, a girl bolted out of another room and into ours, promptly snatching the pad out of his hands.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Now that’s going too far. You can’t look at that.”
One artist who is slightly uncomfortable with his sketchpad being looked through; another, adamant about keeping the lid closed on the artwork she is preparing for a fully realized future: obviously, artists are a bit sensitive about sharing their ideas before they are finished carrying them out, and rightfully so. Getting dressed in the morning would be a real trial if somebody walked in while you were only wearing your underwear and said straightforwardly, “That outfit doesn’t match.”
It’s this unfinished quality, this collection of ideas and questions without solutions, that make Cryptacize’s Dig That Treasure so maddeningly frustrating. Similar to band member (and ex-Deerhoof member) Chris Cohen’s other project, The Curtains, Cryptacize jam plenty of sparse, jagged pop fragments into Treasure without giving any of those ideas space to breathe. Witness “The Shape Above” alone, where co-vocalist Nedelle Torrisi’s powerful wisp of a voice scales and descends the smoky melody it inhabits, not unlike something off the most recent Damon and Naomi record. Enjoying it? Not for long – it only takes the group 20 seconds to switch gears and move to an ironically shapeless, crunchy form that robs the melody of whatever staying power it might have possessed.
This apparent musical self-sabotage poisons this record all over; the winding tension of “Stop Watch” ascends to nowhere, as the murky atmospherics that surround Torrisi can’t decide if they want to stick around on Earth or leave the planet entirely. When Cohen takes over vocal duties, structures don’t get any more jumbled, but they certainly become a lot more staid – the imposing, stark guitar lines and steady percussive tendencies of Michael Carriera vacuum out of “Water Witching Wishes” whatever emotional element might have been drawn from his somewhat sonorous vocal abilities.
There’s legitimate musical promise shown on Dig That Treasure, which makes the mediocrity of the disc all the more heartbreaking. “Heaven is Human” and “We’ll Never Dream Again” are fully formed beasts, taking together Carriera’s unique instrumentation, Torrisi’s ‘60s girl-group voice, and Cohen’s avant-garde guitar acrobatics and turning the unfocused coal into spiky pop pleasures. “No Coins” slowly shifts between seductive and uncertain, as Torrisi regretfully intones, “No coins/ We’ll never have any”. Clearly, when Cryptacize decide to sit down and focus a bit, their songwriting abilities are a lot stronger.
Then again, as Cohen and Torrisi harmonize on “Cosmic Sing-A-Long,” “Every note is an unfinished song.” Maybe the trio’s aim is to take inventory of these notes, rather than to string them together. Even some of the best artists need some sort of cohesion, though; let’s hope they get a hold of that idea before Cohen decides to start another band.