All creativity comes from some place of boredom. Everyone has those nights when they are twiddling their thumbs, and are pacing around their apartment like a raving lunatic. The usual hobbies and distractions are of no use. It’s in those nights where creativity blossoms. There’s that oft repeated story that Aaron Sorkin, the creator of West Wing uses during his interview pressers that’s a useful example here. In one of those nights in New York where everybody he knew were busy, he found himself alone in his tiny apartment. In a bout of boredom, he took out his typewriter and tried to begin weaving his own tales that lingered in his imagination.
This scenario isn’t confined to just screenwriters or people who primarily deal in a visual medium. Some people have overactive minds that must be satiated. It can come out in something as simple as fan fiction, allowing people to create wish fulfillment in an already existing property.
Concept albums have long been the domain of narrative creativity in music for the past 60 or 70 years. My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade imagines someone on their deathbed, crossing into the afterlife, looking at their past life through the lense of arena rock. Husker Du’s landmark album, Zen Arcade, follows a young boy abandoning his unfulfilling home life, only to find the outside world is much worse. The list can go on and on, full with an equal amount of failures and successes.
Depending on who you are, the idea of a concept record, let alone a whole storyline across multiple releases could leave you running the other direction. It feels high falutin, as if the artist is trying to designate some importance that isn’t there in the first place.
Sometimes, as it is for Cloud Cruiser, a desert rock band, it is the organizing principle behind the entirety of the project. Everything else is oriented around the narrative, only helping to bring the ideas to fruition. The EP starts out with a buzzing sound, and a transmission sounds off, orienting the listener in this world. A mysterious voice out in the distance speaks:
We follow the story of a young man on a quest for flight. He is illuminated, but only for a brief time. Returned unfit, he is only a piece of the puzzle that unfolds. The journey is boundless.
“It’s (I: Capacity) kind of insane, ridiculous thing I’ve been piecing over time and trying to figure out how I would want to approach it,” said Tim Ramirez, the frontman of Cloud Cruiser.
The ridiculous thing can be summarized as this: Two friends are having another one of those lazy nights, in which you’re so sunk into the couch, the idea of getting up is unthinkable. Or as stoners like to call it: couch lock. They begin to see a glow of light coming from outside. They go to investigate it, and one of them gets inhaled by a UFO. The other one find himself dumbfounded, only to be abducted seconds later. The alien’s that are going around are harvesting lungs from these guys who happen to have really heavy duty lungs. The journey continues from there.
If you live on the northwest side of Chicago, Ramirez is bound to be a familiar face. He is one of the multiple employees of the music production company, Kickstand, which operates out of Subterranean and Beat Kitchen, two of the more popular Chicago venues. You can usually see him tucked into the corner of Subterranean’s entrance, sporting a flat brimmed baseball hat and a pseudo fu-manchu beard. He’s congenial, making any person feel welcomed in his presence for those few short moments you have to interact with him.
After several years of just letting these ideas sit in his head, Ramirez finally has something permanent to show to the world. With the help of some old friends, Ryan Ristucci and Craig Godar, the songs are fleshed out, feeling appropriately massive and fitting within the thematic content of Capacity. The guitar tones go from warm to cutting in the song Glow, creating a pleasing dynamic. Everything feels like it’s in the right place.
They make use of Wall of Sound Studios, which is located in Humboldt Park and has recorded emo-punk band Retirement Party to chicago hardcore band Snuffed. Cloud Cruiser makes sounds that I could only describe as bleep or bloops, as if some computer generated a tone in several of the tracks. These decisions are fitting, and not just doing weird tricks for its own sake. It makes sense within the context of each song.
Capacity I is only the beginning of a long string of releases, in which we follow this continuous narrative. Ramirez sees it almost as the X-Files, where you would have several disparate storylines. The main pull would still be the main storyline of the abduction, but there will be B or C plots, allowing for other short-term stories to be told. Cloud Cruiser is essentially the creature feature in musical form.
Cloud Cruiser will be playing their release show 2/8 at the Beat Kitchen. They will also be having a listening party at Kuma’s Corner the day before, along with a limited edition burger with their own hot sauce, provided by Soothsayer Hot Sauce.
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