The Sound You Made Was Everything: A Review Of The Town That Cursed Your Name By The Reds, Pinks & Purples
By Berlinda Recacho
Two prospective days-in-the-life form the bookends of daydreams. One is the day you rev your engines with enough escape velocity to break away from your hometown; the other, the day when its gravitational pull -- second only to a black hole -- drags you back across its borders. The motivation is that you should leave to pursue something grand and exciting, and achieve it to return as the shinier 2.0 version of you. Words that describe these awkward transitions are better said in other languages; if the bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, the so-called reifungsroman is its opposite, a ripening, the coming of the end. With each decade, reunions dwindle as the reasons for homecoming lose their power and relevance.
In The Town That Cursed Your Name, Glenn Donaldson's The Reds, The Pinks and Purples stare mortality squarely in the eye, waiting for it to blink, revisiting old haunts as someone who left with something to prove and is back for a reckoning. The songs cycle through rage and melancholy and memory without losing a jangly pop beat. If the past is another country, this is a soundtrack to a map through its twisty roads, where they drive on the wrong side of the road. The jaunty title track is the bitterest pill, unswallowed. The singer has no fond memories of his old stomping ground, and the place retains the same negative impressions of him. "It's a shame your record label failed/too many problems with the media mail… The world won't listen when you try/All the reviewers were unkind" There's a self-conscious moroseness to the lyrics that contrasts with the upbeat tune: "All I wanna do is make you believe/To hear the sound you made was everything/It was everything." In the same cheerfully jaded vein is "Too Late for an Early Grave", a Morrissey-esque lament against existing. As in "Eleanor Rigby" (by another band you might know), "No One is Saved" by aging out of the notoriety of dying young, sentenced to the monotony of a long(er) life.The guilty litany of "Mistakes (Too Many to Name)" calls to mind the rolling and rambling introspection of the band Stars. A subset of songs run a little darker, railing through the melodies with anger and invective. "Life is a Void" is a manual for getting by: "I guess you're lucky that it's not worse/just to be employed/just to be loved and wanting more" go the lyrics, but the tone is more hapless than happy. "Burning Sunflowers" is presented like a fever dream: a sentimental reverie morphing into an eyewitness account of fiery imagery, like the Eighties hit "Summer of '69" hijacked and retooled by The Magnetic Fields.
A triumvirate of simmering cuts present themselves as deceptively gentle, the slow dances if this were an alternative prom. "Here Comes the Lunar Hand" is lovely and apocalyptic, full of melting sand, worlds gone cold, and waves that wipe it clean. "Almost Changed" travels to the cool end of the spectrum "when it all goes too bright/the green then violet, then white". "Break Up the Band" closes the album with a statement of dissolution.The admission "that we failed to make/what you'd call a decent wage/from the streaming rate/I'm sure you understand" feels less like a threat and more like waving the literal white flag. "Love" is conflated between fandom and romance. The phrase "going solo" could mean a change in career or it could mark the end of a relationship. Is this the actual band just talking out of turn on a particularly bad day? With age, comes the clarity that regret is as clear as mud. Life and music are equally murky businesses; tracing back to your beginnings, writing and rewriting your own origin story may be the only way out of the labyrinth.
The Town That Cursed Your Name by The Reds, Pinks & Purples is out on Friday via Slumberland Records.
[Photo: Glenn Donaldson/The Reds, Pinks & Purples]