Craw @ Saint Vitus (pics, setlist, full live recording)

photos by P Squared

Venerable Cleveland post-hardcore crew Craw played one of their two reunion shows at Saint Vitus on March 12, and we’ve got pictures of the show. Openers were STATS and Black Black Black, who we unfortunately missed.

Musician and writer Hank Shteamer, who’s a member of STATS and helped organize the reissue of Craw’s 90s albums on Northern Spy late last year, wrote of the Vitus show:

I left Saint Vitus last night with a different feeling, call it a community awareness, a sense of how an intense, bizarre and uncompromising underground band can become a portal to a shared feeling of transcendence.

I saw so many fans moved on such a deep level by these performances, both those who had seen the band back in the day and those who never got the chance. I saw band members giddy with disbelief at finally getting the reception they’d always deserved but rarely ever got before.
I saw a mutual celebration of the enduring art that craw created, honed and perfected with painstaking effort all those years ago. I saw 75 minutes of classic songs, performed with pure spirit fire and channeled through a frontman who radiates a raving, possessed intensity. I saw sublime musical terror of exactly the sort I remember witnessing when I was a teenager.

These shows were slated to go down back in December in celebration of those reissues but were postponed until March (the other show was in their hometown of Cleveland). Check out more pictures, setlist, and a full live recording (via NYC Taper) of Craw at Saint Vitus, below.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJdUlS3cV3k

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SETLIST: Craw @ Saint Vitus 3/12/2016
Caught My Tell
Chop Shop
Space Is the Place
Unsolicited, Unsavory
Killer Microbes Devour Cleveland
New Plastics Diet Alters Man’s DNA
Parasitic Dad Evades Biocops
Divinity of Laughter
Cancerman
Botulism, Cholera + Tarik
Sound of Every Promise
Strongest Human Bond
Cobray to the North
My Sister’s Living Room
To the Child Reader
405
Elliot