Backwater Station by Cryptozoologists

This album was originally called Songs of Mundanity and Realism. It was changed for maybe obvious reasons; the words mundanity and realism do not really excite the senses, or sparkle with much possibility. Still, underneath the now slightly more ambiguous (but sparkly?) title, mundanity and realism feel to me like the main currents that run through these songs.

The mundane felt like a way into writing about Whitehorse, my hometown, the so-called "wilderness city," and writing against the escapist romanticizing of the wilderness that dominates much of the culture and art here. I spend more time in parking lots than in the woods, and I wanted to hone onto all the urban minutia that gets glazed over in our gaze, in our presence, in our experience, of being in this place. Asking your neighbor for a jump in winter, getting your car egged, navigating the sidewalk when someone is yelling maybe at you, the route of human waste to the municipal sewage lagoon, etc. How to instill these with the same poetic weight as the splendor of communing with nature or whatever. (To be clear, I'm not here to shit on communing with nature, it's just not what is artistically interesting to me).

Realism is a pretty funny word to describe these songs, since I like to think my songwriting style comes from a legacy of surrealism -- dense, elaborate, outlandish metaphors, etc. But realism here as the antithesis to fantasy and escapism, as being grounded to the real, material conditions of our lives, as being able to take in the scale of the suffering, displacement, and abandonment of vulnerable people that is happening locally and globally. These are songs about everyday horror and pain and boredom and shared madness and reactionary hysteria and a great looming sense of doom. I want, desperately, for people to find the courage to, as Donna Haraway says, “stay with the trouble,” and maybe still find possibility.

The real title of the album, Backwater Station, conjures for me this image of a stoic watchman or witness at the edge of the world, which is sometimes (when I want to feel self-important) how I imagine my commitment to living here.

There is a little bit of Big Thief, Fleetwood Mac, the Talking Heads, Tom Petty, Neil Young, and even maybe an attempt at some Velvet Underground, in the sounds of these songs. We recorded the bed tracks at Old Crow Recordings with Cryptos veteran Patrick Hamilton in February 2025, using mostly the first take of each song. We tinkered for a couple of months in arranging and doing of some overdubs on our own. And then in April I went up to Dawson City and hung out with Alex MacNeil and recorded the vocals at Dawson City Music Festival's new recording studio.

It's coming up on ten years since Cryptozoologists first started jamming and playing live, maybe an arbitrary milestone. To my shame, I have not gotten that much better at playing music. I don't think our audience has grown that much, either. I still am unclear what the rationale and outcomes of making music in this way are. But still, this is definitely the best thing Cryptozoologists has made thus far, a culmination of a decade of naivety, futility, and angsty artsy antics. And it's also a culmination of two years of collective effort of working on these particular songs by me, Dawson, Fabian, and Ben, who I am very grateful to.

-Zach McCann-Armitage, December 2025

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