This is a first album for an adventurous guitar band from Billericay. They make a sound that will be shockingly familiar to fans of Bella Union's magnificent EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY.
An hour of slow, cathartic, trance-inducing music invites the listener into the catalogue of stars promised by the title. It does seem from excited reviews of their shows with YOUTH MOVIE SOUNDTRACK STRATEGIES, that many are taking them up on the invitation. Blissful and beautiful soundscapes are the promise.
It’s much less refined stuff than the latest EXPLOSIONS material. It has more in common with the Texans' 2001 debut, with the complication of a singer whose long soaring notes expose a slightly shaky control of pitch. A whole hour of music, with eleven songs to work through, feels like a marathon. The pattern is consistent and predictable, with a couple of huge crescendos per track. Ponderous journeys up and down the scales, with epic, echoey drumming and ringing guitar clarity are the dominant sounds. Silence is used to create a dramatic moment now and then. Sadly, the secret joys of counterpoint and syncopation that take the breath away in an EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY performance are much less well-developed here.
The distance between the standard guitar band and the art rock magnificence of GOD SPEED! YOU BLACK EMPEROR, or even MOGWAI, can only be dealt with now by doing something less reverential and more confidently self assertive. Every great movement spawns its decent imitators and aspirants, and REDJETSON do a decent job. But a couple of plays through this CD leaves me very conscious of just how long it is, and of how much less transported and euphoric I feel than I would be after an afternoon of "This World is Not A Cold Dead Place".
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Even REDJETSON'S titles echo the scriptural starkness of that album's pieces. "New General Catalogue" opens with 7 minutes 40 of "Divorce", but we're soon onto "This Every Day, For The Rest Of Your Life" and "…The Sky Is Breaking". When the sonic references are so blatant direct comparison is impossible to avoid, and the gap between masters and apprentices is just too great. Lyrically, I can only report that after three hours I had still not connected with anything particularly memorable or coherent.
"New Europe" does strike out more adventurously with trumpet sounds, glockenspiel and acoustic guitar. But having struck out, for 2 minutes 42 it ends, without becoming a song or going anywhere musically. Perhaps it represents a trace of the much better album that they will make next time round. "America Is Its Only Friend" has another thoughtful beginning, with some nice left-hand finger squeaks in the guitar track. The bed of Eric Satie-like chords develops against a heartbeat imitation drum track (cf EXPLOSIONS again, I'm afraid) But then things meander off into unintelligible singing and fussy percussion "You flew like Icarus / You're sailing to the sun/ You flew like Icarus".
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