Red Card
S/T
I really hate giving bad reviews. I completely understand that musicians pour their hearts into their music, but it takes a little more than that to make a good album.
Based in Brooklyn, New York, Red Card’s two founding members Sasha and Neven are originally from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where they played together throughout the 90s. They’re a fairly regional band, playing mostly in and around New York. This self-titled debut was recorded about a year before its release on Useless Chord Records.
The first few seconds of track one “Lesson No. 1″ are great, starting off with bouncy, punky guitar riffs and some skillful drumming. Yet as soon as the vocals come in, the music grinds to a screeching halt, collapsing into a tangled mesh of abstract sounds and undecipherable lyrics. It’s almost as if the band is suddenly stuck in a huge wad of caramel, drowning, struggling against their own music. I can discern a few arms and legs sticking out here and there, but the rest is just an incoherent mess.
I could maybe stand this album if “Lesson No. 1″ was just a fluke, a mistake. Everyone’s allowed a few bad songs. But the album actually seems to worsen as it progresses. Someone made the brilliant decision to distort the vocals on track two, a cheap reverb trick that is almost embarrassing to listen to. Even worse than the previous two songs, track three, aptly named “Planet Boredom,” takes an excruciating minute of acoustic bantering just to get to the vocals, which, instead of providing the catharsis that should have come after a minute of instrumental build-up, actually slow the song to a monotonous rap. I could tediously describe the flaws in each of the subsequent songs, but the bottom line is that Red Card doesn’t seem to quite know what genre they want to be, moving from punk to industrial, mingling with electronica and avant-garde. The result is a confused, fumbling sound that doesn’t know where its going.
I could give Red Card a few bonus points if they looked as if they were honestly working hard to evolve as musicians, but these guys aren’t even putting in much of an effort. The album cover is uninspiring, the inside jacket is bland and uninformative, and their website looks as if someone spent about five minutes with MS Frontpage to slap it together. Although these criticisms may seem superficial, effort tells how much a band cares about their listeners and how much pride they have in their work. If Red Card doesn’t look like they give a damn, why should I?
Red Card need to evolve their sound and make a solid commitment to their music. Until then, definitely give this album the “red card” (soccer, anyone?).