Music

Halifax metal band CROSSS lead the druidic takeover

by Mark Teo

For anyone familiar with Halifax’s shape-shifting indie-pop circuit, Andrew March is a known quantity. He’s been in some of the city’s most adored, from the beach-ready Cousins, to the folky Ghost Bees, to herky-jerky art rockers Museum Pieces. But his newest project, CROSSS, has little to do with pop: Their heavily hyped debut LP, Obsidian Spectre, is a groove-heavy occult beast more attuned with classic stoner fare like Sleep, Om, and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett than with his city’s power-pop heritage. It’s also a return to the music of March’s childhood.

“I grew up listening to classic metal, but I grew out of it in my late teens, when I became a jazz musician,” he says. “I never really looked back, until one day, I thought, ‘What does real Andy music sound like?’ I think everyone asks that question internally. Then, [a return to the genre] felt inevitable—I have metal in my heart.”

CROSSS wasn’t initially conceived as a metal project. Their origins actually begin in Montreal—where March lived briefly—where CROSSS was initially meant to be a collaboration with close pal (and Halifax expat) Christian Simmons (of Each Other). The concept eventually crystallized, with Heaven For Real drummer Nathan Doucet and “punk kid” Ryan Allen joining the ranks. “We were a two-piece with Christian for a year, and the band was just an excuse to travel,” he adds, “But we started to be a real band a year and a half ago, when we decided to be a band that works hard and is heavy.

In that span, CROSSS has toured the U.S. and Canada (“a lot of our soulmate bands, like Unblonde and Telstar Drugs, are from Calgary”), cut a single on March’s own Craft Singles label, landed with Telephone Explosion records, and sculpted an inimitable aesthetic. CROSSS may recite classic stoner-rock rituals, but their songs are also defined by repetitious, druidic chanting—it feels like a near-religious experience, which is no accident.

“I’ve always been fascinated with chanting, and everything pre-Christian. I’ve always filled my head with the unknown, anything occult,” he says. “But on a more factual level, Halifax is one of the Buddhist capitals of the world. And while I’m not a practitioner, I’ve pored through lots of Buddhist texts, and shrines have always been a part of my life. There’s nothing really Buddhist about the lyrics, but we look into internal realms—and that’s something you learn from meditation.”

CROSSS’s meditative penchant might also explain their open-minded concept as a band. March maintains that the band doesn’t have a set trajectory—they’re slated to write and record as much as they can, but he expects their aesthetic to be chameleonic. The same rings true for their live show. “There’s a conscious effort to stay open-minded, to be open enough to be inspired by our audiences and peers from all communities,” he says.

“We always assess what’s working and not working—we only plan half of our set. The other half’s improvised, and that’s where we say, ‘How are we in conversation with our audience now, and what does that mean? What does it mean to be alive now, in this moment?’”