Red - Gone

Red are one of the bands I owe my passion for music and for metal to for the enlightenment I experienced when I heard the blend of symphonic elements with well-written emotional alternative metal of their debut album, End of Silence, a satisfaction they repeated on their sophomore release, Innocence & Instinct. After coming through with simply decent, patchy, and seemingly struggled compositions of their third album, Until We Have Faces, Red took the switch-it-up route just a bit with Release the Panic, which still featured some hits but whose absence of orchestral backing in favor of sporadic light industrial flourishes sold the band’s ability to make alternative metal actually epic short. It seemed like the band realized their misstep soon afterwards as well when they put out Release the Panic: Recalibrated, an EP featuring songs reincorporated with swelling string backings more in line with their earlier work, centering them again (as the title suggests) on their signature style. They quickly more than redeemed their previous stumble with 2015′s Of Beauty and Rage, the greatest and most symphonically epic record the band had created since End of Silence. While the correlation of better songwriting to bigger orchestral involvement might suggest the latter to be a crutch for the band, I would argue that symphonic alternative metal is just the space they write best in, and songs like the crushing “Release the Panic” and the somber “Hymn for the Missing” show that Red can write memorable, powerful songs independent of a string section. And after Of Beauty and Rage, I was excited to see Red recalibrated in their ideal vein of creativity keep on moving and killing it.

On Gone, Red have opted to retry experimenting with their sound, but the experiment they’re trying is one that many of their peers have attempted, often with negligible or undesired results, and with this experiment Red have unfortunately diminished the uniqueness of their sound to arrive at a product that most bands yield when they try to overlay their alternative metal with some flashy electronics. The expected strings are there, but buried deep in the mix and more of a supplement than an integral component. But like they did on Release the Panic, Red are tailoring their songs to a less bombastic mood and a more moderated vibe. The kinds of cathartic moments brought on by the majestic bridges of “Let Go”  and “Death of Me” and the enveloping intros of “Impostor” and “Shadows”, usually all over Red albums, are missing on Gone.

There are plenty of highlights still, “Fracture” being the heaviest and the most consistent of them. “Still Alive” and “Losing Control” bring some needed climactic down-tuned riffing to their last minutes. “Singularity”, with its more familiar indulgence in violins and cellos and a tasteful Stephen Hawking sample conjures the biggest climax on the record. And “Chasing Your Echo” is a pretty nice heavy tune as well.

Generic alternative rock/metal songs like “A.I.” and boneless formula tracks like “Coming Apart” and the cheesy “Unstoppable”, however, will probably have a lot of fans urging them to recalibrate again (though “Unstoppable” I think would be a pretty hard one to fix up). And “Still Alive (Looking for a Reason)” with its basic, gutless ballad structure and the corny group vocals that round it off, is surely the weakest finale to any Red album (definitely no “Already Over, Pt. 2”).

I’m usually not one insist artists to stay in one lane and just do what comes easily to them, and I understand Red’s wanting to branch out and keep themselves from being one-dimensional. But Of Beauty and Rage and now Gone have shown that they recalibrated for a reason. No matter how many times they do it, seemingly, Red are at their best doing what they do like no one else, and it’s that uniqueness of their approach to the genre that really makes me hope for another return to form. But if the band do stick it out and venture further on through rocky, crowded musical terrain, I will certainly admire and hope all the best for them. I’ll hope that they can find a way to do something interesting with their new influences and not make what a lot of other bands have made, and I’ll hope that they write with a little more consistency and maybe review a bit more not so much whether they can make some of these more poppy songs, but more whether such songs upon completion really work with the mood they’re cultivating.