Crayon were the early-to-mid 90s precursor to twee-pop kingpins Tullycraft, a band who are more often than not too saccharine even for me, a girl in cat-eye glasses & saddle shoes who owns multiple Bunnygrunt records. By contrast, Crayon’s sloppy, tousled-hair & threadbare cardigan sweater approach to noisy pop was closer in spirit to what bands like Lync or Eric’s Trip were doing at the time than the bordering-on-painfully effervescent preciousness that became Tullycraft’s trademark – when Brick Factory first surfaced in 1994 (on Harriet Records, one of the great underground pop labels of the 90s), they probably would have been just as likely to have a picture of J Mascis taped up on the inside of their lockers as one of Amelia Fletcher. They’re not quite the Bob Mould & Grant Hart of cuddlecore, but there’s an obvious dichotomy between the Crayon songs that have Sean Tollefson (bass) or Brad Roberts (guitar & the lone member who didn’t jump ship to Tullycraft) taking a turn at the mic, with the former being responsible for the boyish-to-the-max & hopelessly out of tune vocals on the more cavity-inducing tracks (“Knee-High Susan,” “The Snap-Tight Wars”). I’m one of those contrarians in the Grant Hart camp & my favorite Crayon songs are typically the ones where Roberts get to yelp breathlessly over some ecstatic racket that sounds like they’ve stolen a few distortion pedals from Unwound (“Small,” “Hope in Every Train,” “Crown”). Really glad to see this one finally reissued – revolution pop-style now. (Happy Happy Birthday to Me; hhbtm.com)
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