The new material that Oakland, Calif., band Cryptacize has hatched lately could be laid out as individual poisoned apples (tis the season for these and those carameled apples with razor blades slipped into the cores), planted by a jealous queen or a curious mind, just to see who would dare taste a bite. They have no trace of foul play, nor are they sour or bitter or caustic to the lips and tongue, but they are devilish demons dressed in apple’s clothing. They’ll only remind you with a light smarting – as if you were licking the node of a live triple A battery to check its juice – that there are as many positive as negative charges to everything we’re aware of, or should be aware of. … [Story Continues Below]

First song
Tail and Mane (Cryptacize) [2.89MB] [880 downloads]


— unreleased
An upbeat dance number. Not to be confused with the shampoo that’s for horses and people, “Manes and Tails.” It’s about a person riding on horseback through the Old West who is searching for a lost love.

Second song
New Spell (Cryptacize) [3.73MB] [832 downloads]


— unreleased
A song about a person who becomes a witch. They warn an unfaithful lover — “be careful what you say and do.”

Third song
Into The Clouds (Cryptacize) [3.00MB] [864 downloads]


— unreleased
We play this one first lately, it’s kind of our ‘warm-up’ song. It’s meant to let people know that our music is starting, so nothing happens too quickly in the beginning. I wrote this little couplet that became the basis of the song about a fictional person, a curmudgeonly old man, who had a flowery plant growing beneath his house (if plants could grow in the dark! Stay with me folks!) He could feel the flower growing and is gradually transformed, though he never knew why.

Fourth song
Galvanize (Cryptacize) [4.20MB] [864 downloads]


– unreleased
In this song I describe a scene in which someone dies. It’s a rainy night and the room is silent. I’m addressing the persona of Death in the song, kind of calling him out because I know he’s ashamed of taking this person away from us. That’s why Death has turned the sky black and started a storm… This one is actually our longest song to date. When we wrote it we were so proud (of its length).

These are adventurous new works that could be taken from the parts of most fairy tales, when the conflict kicks in and things get good. It’s when all of the moralities and the goodness and cruelness are enacted and there’s a weather system about to brew up some inclement conditions for everyone in the picture. We’re regaled with these inclement conditions and they come to be what rainy weather is to a Seattle dweller – just another sunny day. What’s good to picture is an iced gray day, only there’s no coldness to be found, just that which can be found in your pits, or lured from the memory reels. It’s the kind of day that Snow White would have been awoken from her spell on, startled and disoriented. It’s the kind of day that brings to mind the scene from the “Wizard of Oz,” when the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys call up the massive field of poppies to put Dorothy and her travel mates down to sleep so there’s no getting to Emerald City for anyone – all over a pair of shoes. It’s that and it’s just as much, if not more, the snow that Glenda, the good witch, drops down to break the black magic spell. Nedelle Torrisi, who tackles all of the lead singing duties on the four new songs associated with this session, bakes into her pretty voice these somewhat menacing uncertainties – menacing only in that their greatest strengths are lodged in truth and possibility, while still maintaining an Italo Calvino or Walt Disney sense of absurdism. She brings these polarities (of love and revenge) – of the curse and the snowy medication – to the forefront. Torrisi meanders with the odd and enticing music that Chris Cohen and drummer Michael Carreira tack the songs together with, casting a cool autumn wind to the efforts – one that kicks up and kicks down, but is always there in some state, announcing its presence. There is death in some of these songs (the capitalized kind) and there is soothingly restless life on the flip side, combating with the confluence of frayed notes and nerves that provide most of the remaining bodywork. It’s an easy thing to remain calm, cool and collected (that just described Torrisi again) throughout the listening of these songs, but there comes a time when the reflections start to happen and you see what Cryptacize has just done to you and you’ve being given an opportunity to cast off into some serpentine waters, meant for those who can accept that even though you rarely have the patience to watch it happen, flowers fold themselves back up at night, pulling in their colors, because that’s when there’s no telling what could happen. When those nights, with the misty fog rolling in and sitting spookily around the tree and chimney tops, thick and choking, start their scheming or the gray parts of a day action out their desires, they’re accepted as the mere things that gray days do, or the mere things that full moons do to people. The hypnotizing poppies and the flowery plants growing up and out of the dark beneath old man houses are the greenery that makes up the new world that Cryptacize has adopted and there’s not another place like it – where the longer you’re there, the more you feel that it’s where you were meant to find all of the things you never knew you were looking for. There are more of them than you think.

Cryptacize Tour Dates:
All shows with Danielson
10-31 New York, NY – Knitting Factory
11-02 Philadelphia, PA – 941 Theater
11-04 Pontiac, MI – The Crofoot Pike Room
11-05 Chicago, IL – Reggie’s
11-06 Minneapolis, MN – Triple Rock
11-07 Omaha, NE – Waiting Room
11-08 Denver, CO – Hi-Dive
11-09 Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Court
11-11 Seattle, WA – Vera Project
11-12 Portland, OR – Backspace
11-14 San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill
11-15 Los Angeles, CA – Troubadour
11-16 Phoenix, AZ – Modified
11-18 Austin, TX – The Mohawk
11-19 Houston, TX – Walter’s On Washington
11-20 Dallas, TX – Granada Theater
11-21 Memphis, TN – Hi Tone
11-22 Athens, GA – 40 Watt Club
11-23 Asheville, NC – Grey Eagle

Cryptacize MySpace Page
Asthmatic Kitty Records