Ten Notes on a Summer's Day: The Swansong

The last Crass album, completed and released shortly after the group's long-planned breakup and end of live performance in 1984, is more of an EP than anything else, totaling only twenty minutes long. Perhaps inspired in part by the side project Acts of Love album, Crass here takes a sometimes gently grooving tone, while lyrically the more blunt accusations of the past are turned into careful self-examination. The general atmosphere, heightened by the overall design, is almost elegiac in its own way, a reflection back upon a mission that (as the group discussed in the liner notes to the Best Before compilation) turned the band into something it didn't want to be at the end. The ten untitled pieces on the original first side of the album, mastered as one long first cut on CD, feature the Ignorant/Libertine/De Vivre trio continually trading off lines and reflections throughout while the musical wing of the group seems to be improvising gently as it goes. Free isn't raging with his guitar as much as creating atmospheres heightened by Rimbaud's work on piano and synths. His own drumming, along with Wright's bass, keeps things moving forward with sometimes martial precision, other times with an easy swing to it. Both Libertine and De Vivre do some of their sweetest singing yet, while Ignorant takes a distinctly ruminative tone. The second overall cut continues where the first one ended, moody keyboards introducing a partially haunting and meditative, partially choppy and atonal musical piece. It's an instrumental, giving the musicians an unexpected showcase, especially considering their work here bears little resemblance to what Crass' music was generally thought to be. With art showcasing steam or fog outside a building rather than the protest art familiar from other efforts, 10 Notes shows Crass in the end avoiding being painted into a punk rock corner. ~ Ned Raggett