Listening to anyone of Horrid Red’s releases across their decade long existence strikes you with a rarity in music: a clash of disparate styles that don’t mesh yet is to the band’s strength. This confliction of tangles and knots, of psychedelic washes, synth-pop, Neue Deutsche Welle clangour, and indie jangle scraping together with some friction is a unique and consistent trait of the Horrid Red mood.
An offshoot of the more raucous Teenage Panzerkorps, Edmund Xavier and German frontman Bunker Wolf (Glenn Donaldson and Karsten Scholl respectively) enlisted the help of Burial Hex’s Clay Ruby and together have been creating a post-punk sound that’s rich, decadent, and deeply exotic. Their latest LP Radiant Life is another cerebral beast, twelve tracks that are both hardy yet introspective.
An electric balancing act of dreamy textures and weighty industrial heft permeates throughout the record. The urgent ‘Omitted Prophets’ is an infectious and rousing mix of acoustic strumming with twisting keys and strings that lift with its buoyant ear for pop hooks. This sense of drama arises frequently, especially on the first track ‘Brazen Altars’ with its deep piano melody and driving bass, and the delicate psych splashes on ‘Fountains of Clouds’ have a touch of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me romance.
The moments of brooding bite are just as exciting. The smouldering ‘Still Suffering’ has echoes of Nick Cave’s Tender Prey, cavernous chants and a beguiling mesh of Eastern Asian scales with bluesy twang all evoke a dusky, ethereal stir. Hazy wanders of reverb and muffled drum machines envelop and fog like Martin Dupont on the title track, exemplifying Xavier’s creative guitar technique, while the tight ‘Divine Names’ sees Wolf adopt a growling, demonic snarl in its chorus atop an otherwise sunny and upbeat pop number. It shouldn’t work, yet feels wholly necessary when listening for the first or 100th time.
The creative fire that fuels Horrid Red still burns white hot even after a decade. Radiant Life is another glorious addition to a heady body of work which manages to excavate meditative soothe within violent discord.