The Crimea - Oliver Twisted

For the past two days I've been constantly adding updates and links to my own website, inaudible.co.uk, and it's been driving me mad. See, it's a fan site for my favourite band The Crimea, and a couple days ago they released a new album. Online. Without any DRM. For free. You'd think the whole world had stopped the number of people who picked up the story. One of the biggest ones was a major newspaper in the UK, The Guardian, who think the "giveaway could ignite music revolution".

I don't know about that. I do know there's good reason for me following the band for the past 7 odd years. 'Course, at the start they had a few different members, were known as The Crocketts, and produced what can best be described as Welsh cow-punk. The lead singer, Davey, did stuff like this and this.

Then a few members left, a few more joined, they changed their name to The Crimea (though it was nearly the much more interesting Fat Camp Heros) and eventually they started producing much quieter, heart-felt indie with a bit of an edge. They've been compared to everyone from the Pixies to Dusty Springfield. I that's just marketing crap, but anyway. They released three singles and an album, then were signed to Warner Bros for a while who promptly went about releasing the exact same three singles and album once again. When they ran out of stuff to leech off, they dropped the band leaving them to run things on their own.


The song I've added is a never released demo from 2005 called Oliver Twisted (cockney for pissed, if you couldn't tell). The lead singer burned it along with a load of other in-progress tracks to a CD after a gig one evening and handed them to a friend of mine. I have good contacts. I actually have another version of the same song that came on a demo CD I got off eBay. They're almost like chalk and cheese, this one's kinda dark and emo-y, the other is real light and poppy.

Either way, in my opinion it's the greatest song the band have ever produced, and because of that and the fact that, as a good fansite webmaster, I must do my duty to promote the band as much as possible, I'm gonna post the second version of the song later on. That way, if you hate it, or you just forget that there's a free album to be had, you'll get a second chance to fall in love with the only band I've listened to for 7 years. Well, pretty much.