Strictly for the sake of anthropology, I need to gain access to the lives of the people who listen to Crib: the unremitting black, the preposterous cigarette brands, the dog-eared translations of Jean Baudrillard left open on the coffee table to provoke some torturous conversation on the real. Vapid prefixes like "trans-," "hyper-" and "meta-" glissade through the discourses attached to ordinary expressions to no apparent end. Irony alleviates the burden of understanding. Experimentation is held as uprising. The coffee is expensive and wretched.

What's that faint rumble in the distance? Almost sounds like a plane overhead. Or an amplified light bulb. Or a shower in the apartment above you. The sound is even, but prone to slight variation. Check the appliances; you may have left something on.

One of two things will have happened: you will have failed to discern the guilty apparatus and destroyed all your appliances in a brief combustion of Luddism; a nervous-breakdown will follow. Or, you have realized that someone has intentionally put Crib's Forward Backward into your stereo, at which point you will seriously begin to interrogate the wisdom in your choice of friends.

Forward Backward is so prodigiously atrocious that its own disrepute is coded into the design; it can be used against you. If you don't like it you'll be jeered for not getting it. That is Crib's secret for evading criticism: by texturing pure monotony in the guise of so-called subsonic solo bass drone, the work of creativity is shifted onto the auditor. The musician doesn't have to say or stand for anything. So whatever subverted paradigms The Wire critics discover, Crib (aka Devin Sarno) can quietly assume credit for. Whatever inexplicable dullness the Pitchfork critic professes can be chalked up to a flaw in his own sensibilities.

The problem is, I live for this type of shit. I'm probably the last one here to demand anything resembling rock from my music. Be that as it may, this record is simply unacceptable. 43 minutes of barely audible, near-changeless droning bass guitar is given some vaguely hermetic studio treatment and I'm supposed to catalog the sonic insight with a European cigarette and a shit-eating grin to back it up.

You want to hear all about the physiological effects of these low subsonics nipping the old mind-brain dualism in the bud. You want to hear all about how the second track, "Constant"-- a duet with violinist Petra Haden-- aspires to the minimalist anxiety-ridden wonder of John Zorn's Redbird. You want me to cry for the death of music as we know it and go on record proclaiming Forward Backward the prototype for all future sonic excursions. You want me to change my name to Devin. I'll do it if you want me to. But it'll sound like your refrigerator.

-Brent S. Sirota