Cracksman Betty is the album we never intended to make. It was a record-something-every-month project, named for a safecracker (a “Cracksman”) and a blackjack with a woman’s name (a “Betty”), adorned with pirate skull and burglar’s tools, and we finished it up December 2011… or so we thought. But the thing is, I went back and gave those recordings another good hard listen, and realised that I’d improved a lot both as a vocalist and an engineer over that year. So I decided to clean it up, and do some new vocals, and oh, I can totally make Dalek Boy funnier, and Old Black Rum can be a lot more rowdy, and oh, I have this new song (“Song for a Blockade Runner/High Barbaree”) that’ll fit in just great, and… …somewhere along the way, this became an album. It became a piece, a thing, not just an assemblage. Not a complex a piece as Dick Tracy Must Die or far-reaching as Din of Thieves will be, perhaps, but an entity, a set. ‘Or,’ I asked myself, ‘did it? Really? Am I just making that up? Let’s ask some beta listeners.’ And the first response back was: "everything I hear in these tracks is totally Next Level from what came before." …followed by an assortment of “impressive,” “SO MUCH BETTER” [capslock in the original], “awesome,” and “I love Dalek Boy so much.” So I guess I wasn’t making it up! But what is it? I think it’s CRIME and the Forces of Evil – or various subsets thereof – not taking everything quite so seriously. I think it’s an alternate history lesson, I think it’s kicking back in the studio just to have fun, I think it’s riot girls dyking our way around Vancouver starting fights (not that I'd know anything about that, aheh), I think it's cyborgs doing it for the lulz, and I think it’s piracy, riot, and revolution. It’s kicking out some good old Cascadian folk. Give a listen. See what you think.