Crawling On – Dive Star
(self-released, 2025)
Seattle songsmith Crawling On (AKA Aun Backstrom) is here to remind us that dive bars remain resolute, the past is a backseat driver, and a season can hold a lifetime throughout his excellent and expansive new record Dive Star.
We last heard from Crawling On with his 2018 14 Million Dollar Loan EP, and that brakeless joyride of a record covered a lotta ground in little time; an agile transit through shit-kicking cowpunk, folk-ist rebukes, and even some hat tipping towards the vocal stylings of one William Bruce Rose, Jr. It was a confident and economical proof of concept of seeds well planted that bore the big fruit that Dive Star brings to market.
Dive Star opens with the tasteful invocation “Theme For A July Wedding,” a sentimental guitar arpeggiation that acts as a grounding exercise, seemingly holding the rest of the album within itself. “Ready For Love Again” follows smartly behind, an exhibition of Americana balladeering that marches onward throughout the “Ain’t No Angels” and “Do It in a Day” that follow. I like to think these initial chapters sound like The Band helmed by David Allen Coe (just try and imagine THAT version of The Last Waltz), and illustrates what is refreshing about Backstrom: his casual sincerity, deft arrangements, instrumental colorings, and a throat that distinguishes Backstrom from the crowding carbon copies throughout the dreck and din that’s become Instagram-icana.
The focus explicit within this opening quadrilogy of songs is countered by some welcome changes in topography. There’s a countrified shuffle in “The Ballad of Johnie Kirton,” an upbeat eulogizing of the late, great tight end for the University of Washington’s football program; a trek through the beast’s belly in “Devil’s Doorway,” and onward into the resolute “Sad Green Eyes” (both of them romantic remonstrations of the otherwise angelic). The latter’s line of “Darling, I’m a skimming stone, passing as you sink below” is a jewel of lyrical imagery in this crown of an album.
We wash up onto the doorsteps of a couple North Seattle dive bars in “Up at Al’s,” and Aun’s superlative yarning shines through neon-strong here: blue-collar budgets and bar tabs ascendent, convivial crescendoes, upright piano à la saloon, and are those Kirton stats flitting amidst the primate purr? The joy beaming from this song is potent, contagious, and how apropos that the floor rushes to meet us with the sobering whiplash of “Solitary Hearts” on deck. We conclude the album with the reflective “The Long Haul (Last Call)”, itself a goodbye brimming with rough-hewn promises and a bittersweet summation that more than earns its place as this record’s capstone.
This final track brings into focus how Dive Star isn’t a concept album per se, but it has been a journey of distinctly complimentary narrative and musical themes. When a lot of albums can’t shake the shape of their respective petri dishes, this LP has a living, breathing, upright and walking and talking and then running-full-speed-but-oh-shit-it-just-biffed-it-but-oh-wait-it’s-okay-it-got-up-again corporeal vitality, one that we’d all be the better to befriend. In Dive Star, Backstrom’s Crawling On trustily leads us outbound then homeward across ranges of songship that are just as articulate in their immediacies as they are in their reflections.