Sweet Crude Celebrates "Les Lazy" and Val Hollie Has Dreams

Two New Orleans' rock bands debut cool new music today.

There is no more typically Sweet Crude line than “We liked the cross-language pun and the message that sometimes you have to take a chance on love and life." It typifies the band’s dense intelligence, nerdy sense of humor and irrepressible positivity. 

Sam Craft says it when explaining “Laissez Les Lazy” to Fuse.tv, which hosted the premiere of the song from the band’s upcoming album, Créatures, due out April 21 on Rhyme & Reason Records. The band came from Craft’s efforts to learn Cajun French from bandmate Alexis Marceaux’s grandfather, and became an effort to put Cajun French in a contemporary idiom—indie rock. 

Since then, the band has made other rules—no guitars, chief among them—and the results are smart, physical, melodic songs built around rhythm, voices and texture. 

Two years ago, I was pretty excited by New Orleans’ Val Hollie’s “Stepping Outside,” which I described then as borrowing “from the smart, lyrical early '80s British pop--as opposed to the bonkers "No sounds found in nature" '80s British pop. I hear a little Lloyd Cole or Aztec Camera lyricism without the earnest air of humble self-importance both wore like ‘Hello My Name is’ badges.”

He’s back with “The Man Who Has Dreams,” and like “Stepping Outside,” I can’t stop listening to it or watching the video, though both are shot through with a dose of post-grad ennui. Lyrically, the man who has dreams seems to be otherwise isolated from the rest of the world, and the video presents him as detached bordering on pathological. But then there’s the song itself, which has enough life on its own to make all the pieces feel like they’re working in concert on something complex.