The Red Paintings

The Revolution Is Never Coming

Written by: PP on 05/02/2014 21:58:51

This is going to be a difficult one. The long-awaited debut album "The Revolution Is Never Coming" by Australia's The Red Paintings is one of those albums that's inconceivably difficult to digest or even understand conceptually, musically, and lyrically, simply because it might be the most complicated piece of music you'll have heard since the last Tool album. It's a 74 minute mammoth record that took a $250,000 recording budget to realize; a grandiose experiment of challenging, complex art rock that is multifaceted, multilayered, and multi-everything in its nature. Recorded alongside a 35-piece orchestra and a 22-person children's choir, it's an album that bends musical style and genre beyond your wildest imagination. The album is so complicated and features so many elements that it is basically the audio equivalent of attending a mesmerizing theater performance, but this we knew already from their jaw-dropping live shows, which are basically overwhelming audiovisual experiences that compare to nothing in contemporary music.

Yet the whole escapade is without the pretension of most art rock bands. It's not trying to be better than its listener, nor trying to explore the musical equivalent of the quantum theory in terms of strictly technical aspects to the music. Instead, The Red Paintings play music at its most unique: symphonies brought by string instruments provide grandiose passages, these flow naturally into more straight-forward alternative rock sections, which often transform into electronic samples, violent instrumentation, soothing ambience, or just general atmosphere. And none of this feels unpredictable or like it was merely copy/pasted together. All the pieces fit together as they should in your mind, yet the result is some of the most atypical music you'll come across, making direct comparisons to other artists impossible. Tool, as mentioned before, comes close at least conceptually, but musically there are brief undertones of 65daysofstatic, Radiohead, and even the larger-than-life soundscapes of 30 Seconds To Mars present in the mix.

Embedded within all of this are samples and narrations from movies ranging from Alice In Wonderland to Spielberg's A.I., while the lyrical universe explores outer space, local politics, and so much else in a distinct storytelling manner; a 28-page booklet accompanies the disc with the full story for those interested. This among the already unfathomably weird instrumentation that somehow - in ways I cannot explain on paper - manages to merge catchy songs into 9 minute symphonies of artistic, abstract landscapes translated into their audio equivalents on tape. The alternative rock passages make the lengthy songs tolerable as they provide something to latch onto whilst the band explores the outer corners of the musical universe; the importance of this cannot be understated on a 74-minute album. Rich and detailed soundscapes don't even begin to describe what is happening throughout "The Revolution Is Never Coming"; to listen to this with anything but an excellent pair of headphones is a complete waste; so is to go into the album expecting pop choruses or any other accessible points in general.

9

Download: Wasps, Dead Children, Walls, The Revolution Is Never Coming
For the fans of: 65daysofstatic, Tool, Radiohead, 30 Seconds To Mars
Listen: Facebook

Release date 01.10.2013
The End Records / Graphite Records

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