Album Review: Can't Love by Turn to Crime

When Brooklyn-based power trio Awesome Color broke up in 2010, frontman Derek Stanton moved home to Michigan and started working on a solo, ambient noise project. Although he wrote and recorded much of Can’t Love on his own, he turned to friends Ian Saylor and Dorian Foerg as the project evolved into a trio. The result is Turn to Crime’s debut record—a seven-track collection of experimental garage rock that hisses and squeals for almost 40 minutes.

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With Awesome Color, Derek Stanton brought freshness to driving garage rock, a style that too often sounds like a copy of a copy. That creativity is virtually the only thing his subsequent project, Turn to Crime, has in common with his musical past. It's also the focal point of Can't Love, an album whose beginning and end reflect its full scope. Emerging from "I"'s organ drones, the title track's black-hearted pop cruises along on a noisy, mechanical beat and jangly guitars; as Stanton scowls "I don't want good times/I don't like sunshine," he makes being miserable sound like a lot of fun as he covers his heartbreak with paint-it-black cool.

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It's always a treat when emotionally barren curmudgeons have a way with a tune. "I don't like sunshine/I don't want good times/I can't love," harrumphs Derek Stanton on the sludge-pop title track of Turn to Crime's debut release. This three-man band pack more than just another garage-rock sugar-hit, though. Stanton used to be in Awesome Color, a now-defunct ur-rock trio, but has considerable interests outside the Stooges' back catalogue.

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Having plowed through countless shows and six-plus years with Brooklyn’s dirge-garage rockers Awesome Color, singer/guitarist Derek Stanton has taken his solo Turn To Crime back to his original digs of Michigan to (probably) hunker down in one of those fabled cheap warehouses to make his art, the kind you read about in all those “Detroit is back!” articles. Well, people like Stanton aren’t fooled. They actually live in Detroit, walk the streets, wonder where the cops are, read about the corruption, blow tires in endless potholes, see amazing bands at dives, stumble home alone, and see their friends come and go, move back and leave again and…kill time maybe? Oh, the supposed freedom of cheap living battling the desire to crash on your couch and do Breaking Bad marathons.

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