Crawl Below is the post-doom project from Charlie Sad Eyes, a Connecticut performer with a plaintive voice and a soft-spot for the damned. His latest LP 9 Mile Square pays tribute to the folklore and surprisingly tortured history of the part of New England he calls home. All of the instrumentation and vocals on the album were recorded by Charlie himself, cloaking his Peter Steele girded vocals, in a nightmarish mantle of grave wallowing chords and percussion as sticking, smooth as the petals of a black rose. The songs on 9 Mile Square are as beautiful as they are incorrigibly sad.
You can stream Crawl Below’s 9 Mile Square below, and then keep scrolling to read an exclusive interview with Charlie himself:
Interview conducted over email on January 30, 2021. It has been edited slightly for the sake of clarity.
How did Crawl Below start, and what is the philosophy behind the band?
I’m in some actual bands with other humans, but I’ve also written a bunch of music that doesn’t fit in with those groups and that’s what Crawl Below is. It’s where all my metal ideas go. That’s why it changes from album to album. If I feel like doing punk black metal, I’ll do that, or Lovecraftian drinking songs or whatever. For instance, the next Crawl Below is already recorded and is death doom with virtually no clean vocals. There’s no real philosophy, other than, “that’s where my darker stuff goes.” I have some other solo projects for my lighter stuff.
How did you get the nickname “Sad Eyes”?
My friend Josh Altvater from Black Horse Rebellion said, “Dude, I’m sorry but you have the saddest eyes ever.” He’s right, I basically look like a tattooed basset hound. Plus the majority of my songs are depressing. So it stuck.
Is there a story behind the title of your album, 9 Mile Square?
It’s a concept album about the town I live in, Norwich, Connecticut. Two hundred years ago, it was nicknamed the “9 Mile Square” because that’s how much land it took up. I thought it was cooler than just calling the album Norwich.
I’m hearing a lot of different stuff on this album, sounds like some Paradise Lost, maybe some Failure, and also… REM??? I admit that I may be grasping at straws here. Where are you coming from musically on this release?
Ha, it’s cool to hear that. I usually just get, “u sound like Type-O, but worse! lol.” I wrote this album in 2014 and was listening to a lot of Alcest and melodic black metal at the time. I’m also a huge Social Distortion fan, so those two things kind of blended for this release. The demo recordings from 2014 are all death and black metal vocals, but I decided to go clean when I rerecorded it. My friends say I sing like a “sad Dracula,” so that’s where the Type O comparisons usually come from. I appreciate the alt-rock comparison though, I love that stuff. I didn’t just want to write the 10,000th bad Black Sabbath clone, doom album, so there’s some outside influence in there.
What are some of the historical and folkloric reference points for the album?
“Feed The Towers Above The Trees” is about the two casinos here in Eastern Connecticut (as far as I know the two biggest in the world) and their effect on the region.
“Fire On The Hill” is about a cliff called Lantern Hill that the colonists would use to alert the militias of approaching English ships during the Revolutionary War.
“Kingdom Of The Ruined” is about the Norwich State Hospital, a gigantic and abandoned mental hospital here in town, and the effect it had when it was defunded and some of its patients became homeless (I wasn’t one of them).
“Monument” is about a famous tribal battle that happened here in which one chief executed another after they both jumped off an insane cliff a couple miles from my house.
“Tarnished The Name” is about Norwich’s most infamous resident, the Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold. He sucks.
“Nine Miles Square” is about how Norwich was once the millionaire capital of the US and definitely isn’t anymore.
What do you hope people take away from listening to your new album?
When I was a kid in the ’80s, all those hair metal albums had one power ballad. I always wondered what it would be like if the whole album was power ballads. And I didn’t want to sing about gross mushy stuff like love so I chose historic subject matter. I’d be cool with people seeing it as an alternative to the extremes of metal, while still being nominally metal (in tone, at least). I’ve had people say they fall asleep to it and I don’t take it as an insult.
What are your plans for promoting this record since you can’t play shows for the time being?
Covid was the perfect time to release this album because Crawl Below is not a live thing anyway. When live playing comes back, I’ll be too busy with my actual bands (When The Deadbolt Breaks and Sentinel Hill). I usually don’t have enough confidence to promote my stuff literally at all, but I believe in this album to an extent so I’ve been making videos and doing some interviews and getting some metal podcast plays here and there. The result has been decent. I know it’s not for everyone and wasn’t really meant to be.
Buy Crawl Below’s 9 Mile Square here.
Follow Crawl Below on Facebook here.
