Crash Rickshaw returns after 20 years

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, November 13th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The return of the band Crash Rickshaw. Twenty-four years ago, its debut album pushed the envelope for Christian rock.

BROWN: Years later, the group’s second release barely saw daylight. But now, the band is back with a strong new EP.

WORLD’s Arsenio Orteza has a review.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Big Sir—that’s S-I-R—is the new EP by Crash Rickshaw and the first new music from the quartet in approximately 20 years. Its four songs only last 13-and-a-half minutes, but the band makes those minutes count.

MUSIC: [Sugar Shack by Crash Rickshaw]

This is “Sugar Shack.” The lead singer Joby Harris says the song is a chance for the band to savor fond memories of the Huntington Beach scene in which it got its start, a scene that included cute Christian girls.

HARRIS: That's why you'd want to drive an hour every weekend to go hang out, right? So, yeah, Orange County, Huntington Beach, very, very Christian, and I think it kind of still is. But back then, it was just nothing but youth groups and shows and churches, and yeah, absolutely, anytime you went down, there was a beautiful girl in Huntington Beach.

In 2001, guitarist Randy Torres, bassist Steve Dail, and drummer Alex Albert were enjoying popularity as three fourths of the alternative-metal, post-hardcore band Project 86. It was a group whose audience was part Christian, part mainstream. But Project 86 was between albums. So Torres, Dail, and Albert hooked up with Harris and recorded an album as Crash Rickshaw. I asked Dail why he and his Project 86 bandmates had felt the need for a side project.

DAIL: I think just to do something a little different. And Joby was, you know, had a different voice and different singing capabilities, and it was just—just sounded like a fun thing to do, you know? And at the time, like you said, we were doing well, and we were pretty locked in with Tooth & Nail, and—and Brandon Ebel at Tooth & Nail said, “Oh, if you want to do a side project, I'll put it out.” And so we're like, “OK, let's… let's do it!”

Brandon Ebel’s Tooth & Nail Records was, at the time, the go-to label for high-quality indie Christian rock. It had already helped put acts such as MxPx, Stavesacre, and the O.C. Supertones on the map. Crash Rickshaw was a perfect fit. The group’s music snarled with a punk energy so intense that at times it almost obscured the big topics its songs were addressing.

MUSIC: [Johnny Law by Crash Rickshaw]

“Johnny Law” is a song calling out Christians whose legalism drives away the lost. And it’s not the only Crash Rickshaw song shouting to the choir. “Angry Sunset” is an energetically noisy meditation on Ephesians 4:26. The song “Thank God I’m an Atheist,” on the other hand, confronts atheists with the irony that “It takes infinite knowledge to know / that there’s no God that holds you.” Crash Rickshaw was well received, but Project 86 remained Dail, Torres, and Albert’s primary commitment. Joby Harris says by the time Crash Rickshaw convened for its second album, The Unknown Clarity, a few years later, the environment that had once nurtured indie-Christian music had begun to change.

HARRIS: At that point, the entire Christian punk-rock, hardcore scene that was in Orange County was slowly starting to fade. And people in that scene—we were all the same age. We were all from, like, 18 to 25. And, suddenly you had families. You couldn't just hang out and do nothing anymore. You had to find a job. So that was what a lot of people in the bands had to do as well. “Hey, I can't tour anymore. I gotta take care of my family. I gotta get a job.”

Steve Dail remembers the recording of The Unknown Clarity as a rather diffuse process.

DAIL: We started recording that on our own. Like, way back, like—I think it was—like, 2002, somewhere in there, and just kind of started piecing it here and there. And it just kind of went on forever, right? And, like, we just never quite finished it, and everybody was busy. And [we] finally finished, you know, what we thought was an acceptable record at the time. And it just kind of never materialized into anything.

Well, it materialized into something. Ten vinyl copies, to be exact. But, essentially, the album vanished—and with it Crash Rickshaw. That is, until this year when the group reconvened for Big Sir. Mixed by the Grammy-nominated J.R. McNeely, the EP is what kids today might call a “banger.”

MUSIC: [Newports by Crash Rickshaw]

That’s “Newports.” Joby Harris told me that he called it that because, like the cigarettes after which it’s named, it’s about something that can slowly kill you over a long period of time.

HARRIS: The whole song is about social media, and the—you know, that it's a sociopathic platform, and that it pulls us, and we attach our value to it. And then we're on it, and four hours go by, and we've just lost a moment. So it's about being present, you know, that now is all that life gives us. And how do we be fully here and now? And, you know, be a little bit more detached from the pressures of all that.

So why is the EP called Big Sir?

HARRIS: The theme of the album is talking about big voices, big people that can easily take over your narrative if you let them. So we have a responsibility to—to reclaim our narrative and write it ourself.

Appropriately enough, the EP’s title track speaks truth to power in a pretty big voice itself.

MUSIC: [Big Sir by Crash Rickshaw]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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