Crime & The City Solution - Shine (LP) - Gold Vinyl

Shine finds Crime & The City Solution right in the pocket of their Berlin years, the moment when Simon Bonney’s drawl and a Euro-gothic sense of space snapped into focus. Released in 1988 on Mute, it is the band’s second full-length and still feels like a secret shared between night bus travellers and crate diggers who know to check the liner notes for certain surnames. By this point Bonney had moved the group from Australia to Europe, and you can hear the city in the songs, all sodium light and wet cobblestones, with the violin scraping at the edges like a chill wind.

The lineup here crystallises what people tend to mean when they say Crime were cinematic. Mick Harvey brings his usual unshowy precision, sculpting guitar and keys into something spare but strong. Alexander Hacke, moonlighting from Einstürzende Neubauten, colours the corners with a bright, metallic bite, while Bronwyn Adams’ violin translates Bonney’s imagery into long, yearning lines. That mix, equal parts grit and romance, gives Shine its spine. It is not busy music. The band leaves air in the arrangements, which lets Bonney sit right in the middle, half confessor, half town crier.

On Every Train, subtitled Grain Will Bear Grain, might be the touchstone. It rolls in like a weather front, drums pushing forward in a steady clip while the guitars chime and scrape. Bonney sings of movement and consequence, obsession circling back on itself. It is a fan favourite for a reason, the kind of track that makes you want to flip the sleeve and find out who played what. All Must Be Love is the album’s straightest arrow, not because it is soft but because it is clear. The band builds a hymn from simple parts, Adams’ violin sighing between the lines as if trying to pick a lock. Hunter and Fray So Low go moodier. The tempos sit just below a march, bass and floor tom keeping time while flashes of guitar and violin flare and fade. Even the ballads feel carved from stone.

Context matters with this band. A year before Shine, Wim Wenders put Crime & The City Solution on screen in Wings of Desire, performing Six Bells Chime in a Berlin club. That scene, all smoke and spectral lighting, is practically a mission statement. Shine carries that atmosphere into a full album, less a collection of singles than a single weather system. It sits comfortably next to The Bad Seeds of the same era, but where Cave tends toward theatrical menace, Bonney comes across like a weary witness, looking for a way to make sense of the mess. The writing leans on elemental images, trains and water and distance, which suits a voice that sounds born to travel.

The production keeps everything honest. Guitars are thin but present, drums dry, vocals up front. You can feel the room around the kit, hear the bow on the string, no gloss hiding the grain. It is music built for rooms with wooden floors and tall ceilings, which makes Shine an especially satisfying spin on a good turntable. The stereo image breathes, the violin blooms, the low end is taut rather than boomy. If you have been eyeing Crime & The City Solution vinyl, this is the title that seals the deal.

It is also a tidy entry point for anyone tracing a line through the Mute family tree. You can hear the label’s Europe-meets-Australia sensibility in every track, the way rhythm sections serve the song and guitars behave like percussion when needed. That shared DNA explains why the album has aged so well. There is no production fad to date it, just strong writing and a band with a clear idea of its own weather. Critics at the time clocked it as a step up in focus, and listening now you get why. The songs hold their shape, even at low volume, yet feel enormous when you turn the knob.

If you are crate digging in a Melbourne record store, keep an eye out for a clean copy of Shine vinyl, or think ahead and buy Crime & The City Solution records online before the prices creep. Among Crime & The City Solution albums on vinyl it is the one that tends to convert the curious into the devoted. For folks building a turntable library of brooding late 80s classics, it sits neatly beside The Triffids and The Go-Betweens, a darker cousin with the same poetic streak. And if you are shopping across vinyl records Australia, do yourself a favour and make room for this one. It is not flashy. It just lingers, and then it stays.