CRUTCHES

Crutches is actually a quartet led by Leipzig-based guitarist Jan Frisch (who is often heard playing a double-neck instrument with an electric bass). But the focus is on the keytar played by Olga Reznichenko, a, let’s call it suitcase instrument, combining a guitar and
a keyboard. That still doesn’t begin to explain the stylistic hybrid of jazz-rock, metal, math rock, punk, Krautrock, and noise, because Crutches is a collaborative band that is most compelling when its members  play their music in perfect harmony, as if born of the moment.

Even, and especially in this unbalanced diversity lies an aesthetic urgency that comes to the fore when dystopian sounds from the analog and digital toolkit collide with the shrill, squealing feedback of the electric guitar, while harshly pounded rhythms harshly pounded on the drum set shake the very foundation of music itself, and the keytar defines the harmonic space with just a few notes. This is provocative because it roughly and rawly avoids aesthetic clichés. Yet it also reveals an artful acrobatics that is as overwhelming as it is comical.