Red Red Meat
There's a Star Above the Manger Tonight
Sub Pop
Release Date: 1997
Good production is a strange and terrible thing. Mopping up sonic crud can leave you looking at a gleaming hardwood floor -- or your mom's brown linoleum. Good production set Nirvana afloat on the mainstream. It also nearly drowned the Beatles. The gloss of good production is often reviled in indie music for
dumbing down an artist's work.
But There's a Star Above the Manger Tonight, the latest offering from Red Red Meat, is a pristine mess, a musical baklava where each layer is cleanly defined, then crunched down into a honeyed jumble. It's like picking the insects out of a cobweb while leaving each gossamer strand intact.
Like a jazz improv group formed by mental-ward patients with all
the wrong instruments, Red Red Meat climbs, jumps, soars and crashes,
only to do it all again . . . and again. "Sulfur" simmers and
bubbles in a deep metal funk, only to be followed by the title
track, a percolating, acid-country crooner. "Chinese Balls" borrows
tortured college-boy art-rock from the Archers of Loaf
and Shudder to Think, then segues into the Eastern mystic
tiptoe shuffle of "Second Hand Sea."
Genre is not an issue here. Each piece identifies the shortest distance
between the beginning and the end -- and then deliberately walks all over
it, sidestepping and crisscrossing all the way to the
finish line. The only rules seem to be: 1. Milk the most
out of each bridge and riff, and 2. For heaven's sake, boys,
keep it clean.
The album, not a jewel but definitely a semiprecious stone, would be
unbearable but for the production. A lazier / less talented / more
indie-cred-obessessed group would have left this intricate web dusty
and grimy -- and if you can't tell what it is, you may as well throw it
away. But band member and producer Brian Deck has cleaned each crevice
with a toothbrush -- you can even eat off the feedback and distortion.
It sparkles. And rather than commercializing or dumbing it down, Deck's
good scrubbin' makes each track on each song stand out. It's still a
tangled web, but at least you can follow the strands.
Experimentation gives rise to the haunting, the alarming, the downright
religious. But it always walks a thin line between breakthrough and
breakdown. Sacred circle and circle jerk. With only
a handful of misses (such as the indulgent end of "Paul Pachal"
and the interminable "Just Like an Egg on Stilts"), Manger is a
testament to what can happen when clean production is used for
good and not evil.
-- Lindy Powell
powell@outersound.com
