Red Red Meat
There's a Star Above the Manger Tonight

THE REVIEW

And I don't care if when I talk about Red Red Meat to my friends they give me strange looks, to me they are famous and important. Sometimes it's necessary to listen to something direct, that grabs you by the guts. And Red Red Meat are passionate, genuine, they're just right, they're a steak to eat raw.

The Red Red Meat are one of the great bands of the nineties, formed in Chicago by Tim Rutili and Glenn Girard, inspired by the city's great blues tradition. Right at the start of the nineties when grunge was becoming saturated, they represented a strong innovative push by reinterpreting blues in a post variant, a unique vision of the nineties.

It's music that sounds like it's always existed. I love the imagery. There's certain music that seems to be part of your DNA. I think our job is to find that music in what we do. Not through imitation of others, but within ourselves. This is what Rutili said in an interview about the blues, and for good reason, and their music updates that concept, meaning while having the same spirit and attitude it turns out to be strictly modern. It's something that has to do with the acceptance of tradition and your origins, and with freeing yourself from them without losing familiarity and beauty.

After the excellent self-titled debut of '92 (highly recommended), an album that along with this represents their artistic peak, and after a couple of other excellent albums, in '97 they released "There's a Star Above the Manger Tonight." Compared to previous works, this is perhaps the most experimental, more eccentric in being more considered and jagged while just as raw; though seemingly haphazard in its arrangements, their postmodern blues is actually complex and enhanced with organ, mandolin, and violin here and there. To put it briefly, if the first album was like a nuisance drunk, this one is like a heroin addict minding his own business.

Some say they play acid-blues, others say grunge-blues, but ultimately their music seems like listening to Steve Albini playing Captain Beefheart's Safe As Milk, or Sonic Youth playing the Rolling Stones, or better yet Robert Johnson playing Slint. In short, you decide. Absolutely fantastic.