andrew.pilsch.com

The new album by the Red Sparrowes appeared on the internet recently. I don’t plan on listening to it, as I can’t even remember their first album (beyond being pretty sure I listened to it). The band has also had a split release with Grails (whom I can’t stand, either). Anyway, as I said, I wasn’t predisposed to like this album.

However …

… I read that the freaking album is a concept record about The Great Leap Forward. Not even just the Great Leap Forward, itself: the album is a meditation on the mass killing of sparrows that ended up causing a huge famine and nearly lead to an ecological collapse when the locust population expanded out of control. Now, I’m thinking to myself that I really, really need to hear this record.

But Wait!

The Red Sparrowes are one of those instrumental “post rock” bands that don’t have any lyrics. While I don’t want to go off on a digression about how stupid it is to call music that has coexisted with “regular” rock music for more than a decade “post rock”. The point I’d like to make here is, if not for someone telling me that this is what the record is about, how would I ever know? With other concept records, like Quadrophenia or Tommy or something not released by the Who, you have things like lyrics to help you follow some sort of narrative. This is like all the people who used to try and tell me that Godspeed You! Black Emperor was somehow anti-American. I mean, sure, that one record had George Washington cutting off some dude’s hands, but that could mean, like, anything.

The point here, though, is that I could just as easily, now, start telling my friends that one of the guitar dudes in, say, Explosions in the Sky told me at a show that their last album was totally a concept record about, i don’t know, Deuleze & Guattari’s concept of the war machine (I mean, we do have an album about Foucault). If I could convince enough people, it would be difficult to refute. It’s not like the time I told my friend that that 3rd eye blind song that was so hot in high school was actually about snorting meth: in that case, I could cite textual evidence.

I guess the whole point of this is that I’m not, in fact, going to listen to the new Red Sparrowes album, despite the fact that the band “claims” that the record is “about” something cool. The idea of recording an instrumental concept album strikes me as odd. Although, now I’m thinking about Shostakovich’s “Leningrad Symphony” …

I guess the point is I just don’t like Red Sparrowes and I’m not willing to give their wacky new concept record a listen, and that mid-century, Maoist agricultural policy seems like a really strange “subject” for an album of instrumental “post” “rock.”