Cambridge band Bouquet of Dead Crows releases third album

Cambridge band Bouquet of Dead Crows recently released its third album, which largely tackles issues related to mental health.

The four members – Antoinette “Toni” Bruce (vocals), Neil Bruce (guitar), Andrew Coxall (drums) and Karen Gadd (bass) – refer to their sound as a ‘sci-fi alt rock’, which combines big riffs with big melodies and shifting time signatures.

This sound is also described as Blondie meets Black Sabbath and The Cardigans meets Russian Circles and is spread throughout Hemispheres, the new album, which came out in full last month.

Due to Covid, Hemispheres was actually released in two parts – Part 1, Celestial, was released last year and is the first six tracks of the album, while Part 2, Cerebral, launched on October 22 and is made up of the last five songs.

So Hemispheres is essentially the collective name for two halves that make up a whole. “We’d recorded a good chunk of it [before the pandemic] and luckily we’d managed to finish the first six songs,” says Neil, who is married to singer Toni.

“We finished those in February 2020 and were planning to do a load of gigs around March/April, and then obviously Covid happened and we decided that because we had these six songs, we thought we may as well release them.

“So we released them digitally and managed to go back in the summer this year and finish off the second half. It’s slightly surreal, I guess, because we started so long ago.”

Neil says only one of the songs was penned during lockdown. “Standing at the Precipice was written over lockdown and we actually demoed that one remotely,” he explains, “which is the first time we’ve done anything like that. And I guess that song was definitely about...

“I think everyone went through it, didn’t they, with lockdown – this whole thing of drinking too much and then exercising too much. It was just surreal, wasn’t it? And obviously not being able to be in the room together and play and not being able to gig...”

On the album’s overall theme of mental health, which is a topic the band is very passionate about, Neil says: “I would say most of the songs on the album are to do with various band members’ struggles with mental health, be it anxiety, depression or a combination of the two.

“It’s something that we’ve written about in dribs and drabs before but I think with this album it’s the first time we’ve really focused on it. There’s a lot of negativity around mental health and we’ve tried to make something positive out of a bad situation.”

Musically, Neil believes that this record is “probably heavier than the first two” because it “naturally progressed that way, and also it covers a lot more ground musically”.

He adds: “When we were writing it, myself and Toni were listening to a lot of jazz so I think there are elements of jazz within the heavy riffs. I think there’s a lot more going on, there’s a lot more melody, a lot more rhythms. I think whereas the first two albums were just like rock records, with this there’s a bit of everything. There’s some electronic stuff creeping in as well...”

The band began in 2013. Neil says: “I was in two bands at the time and a lot of the songs I was writing didn’t seem to be suitable for either band, so I ended up just recording bunch of demos on my own, and then Toni came on board and recorded vocals and then we found Andrew, our drummer, through the website Cambridgebands.com.

“He put an ad out saying he was looking to join a band – he’d just moved to Cambridge – and we hit it off straight away. We had a chap called Graham on bass for the first part of the band and then more recently we’ve had Karen join us on bass, so this album is the first album that Karen’s played on.”

Bouquet of Dead Crows has performed at various Cambridge festivals and venues, including Strawberry Fair, The Portland Arms and The Blue Moon, and plans to do a tour next year.

Before then it has a gig at The Smokehouse in Ipswich on December 11 and the BrewBoard brewery in Harston on December 18.

For more on the band, go to facebook.com/deadcrows.

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