Before going to Warped Tour this year, my friend Kelsi and I made a significant effort to listen to all the bands that were going to be at our date by looking them up and creeping on them on MySpace. The bands that we HAD to see were bolded. The bands that we HAD TO SEE NO EXCEPTIONS were bolded with a little star net to them, like so:
HAD TO SEE NO EXCEPTIONS*.
Thank you, Kelsi.
This band called CrashCarBurn was on that list. We’d never even heard of them before Warped Tour, part of it might be that they hail from South Africa. So, we arrive at Warped and no band that we really wanted to see was playing first, mostly metalcore bands that we didn’t really want to see that badly. If you’ve ever been, you know that there are tons of booths to occupy your time (and strip your wallet) during the downtime that you have while waiting for a band that you want to see. We set out to find a couple of specific booths, only to be stopped in our tracks by this guy with an iPod and headphones. He offered us a listen, and as we were listening to them, I looked over at Kelsi and went ‘This was starred on our list!’. The guy with the headphones (who was the lead singer, we found out later) gave us a quizzical look until I explained the list to him. With that, he grinned, gave us a sticker with the time and the stage that they were playing at, telling us that he hoped that we would come. We promised we would.
There’s the background story.
The CD that I bought at the end of their too-short set, This City Needs A Hero is very good for a first album. Not explosive, but the sound definitely caught my attention, a good listen. It’s good fresh powerpop, nothing too hard. The ten-track CD comes with the music video to ‘Serenade’, and track titles like ‘Scarlet Letter’ and ‘So Young’ just interest you in listening to them. If you get a chance to, head on over to the myspace at myspace.com/crashcarburn, you can listen to their songs for yourself and make your own judgments. I’ve seen them live and I thought that they were very entertaining, they kept us smiling and clapping and tapping our feet the entire time. It was a nice ‘cool-down’ to go to at Warped Tour since there was no moshing. They’re from South Africa, though, so if they head back over here to the states, take the opportunity to go see them if you can. They’re a very entertaining band and an excellent listen, and I hope that they get more exposure in the near future.
