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MP3 The Red Army - Tomorrow's Unforgiving Sun
13 MP3 Songs in this album (60:03) !
Related styles: ROCK: Rock & Roll, ROCK: Folk Rock
People who are interested in The Clash Iggy & The Stooges Led Zappelin should consider this download.
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Review/Bio
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Written by Jen Kessler
It’s criminal, how easily we loyal lackeys of academia forget the importance of questioning the world around us. Tomorrow’s Unforgiving Sun, the latest album from Athens’ incendiary ensemble The Red Army, demands listeners halt and recall the importance of “why?”
A howling revolution of consciousness via auditory thrill.
Speakeasy had the recent opportunity to sit down and speak with The Red Army, an illustrious crew of OU students comprised of Will Cooper (lead vocals/rhythm/lead guitar), Austin Young (rhythm guitar/vocals), Christopher Miller (lead guitar), Jon Moore (drums/percussion), Matt Johnson (bass) and Leon Allen III (vocals/percussion/sound manipulation). The boys converse with an ease that invites both laughter and comfortable argument, discussing topics that range from top secret tattoos to the digitalization of tunes, to the painful prevalence of racism.
The Red Army was born a much smaller unit in ’07. Cooper and Young met as freshmen in ’06 and had chattered about getting together to play some guitar, but plans just never seemed to pan out. “[Will] egged me on to play guitar with him,” Young said, grinning, “but he lived on West and I lived on East. So we never played.”
A year later, in an entirely apropos twist of circumstance, the two united once again in a History of Rock class. They finally sat down together – and ended up cranking out five or so songs in a single go. It wasn’t long before Cooper and Young, an acoustic act at the time, started hopping on every open mic in town.
The first show The Red Army played was last year’s Courtside Fest, which the band refers to with rueful smiles as rather disastrous. Courtside Fest was a hip hop show, and the two fellows wailing on acoustics weren’t especially well received. Cooper and Young point to their entirely-acoustic beginnings as a little problematic at the outset – the force and depth of ideas behind The Red Army simply didn’t translate well on acoustic guitars. “We kind of came off as this weird cheap novelty, a trying-to-be-serious Tenacious D,” Young said. “We knew from the get-go that wasn’t what we wanted to do.”
The two slowly started acquiring instrumental comrades, starting with Miller, who shared a bathroom with Young in Bromley Hall. Now, with the release of their third album Tomorrow’s Unforgiving Sun, The Red Army has morphed into a pounding, powerfully electric voice that commands notice – a proper vehicle for the ideals that spur the band onward.
The fact that these boys have something to say is clear in their very name – the Red Army was, after all, the armed forces of the Soviet Union, so named to represent the blood of the working class. The connotation is powerful. However, to say that the band is simply political would not quite cover it. The Red Army is personal and philosophical, sharp and realistic.
“We’re just acknowledging our situation,” Cooper said. “Take for instance – misogyny. We live in a society that is overwhelmingly misogynistic. We’re trying to battle against that, but at the same time we acknowledge that we were raised in this society too, so we have that as part of who we are.”
The band seems to grasp the reality of today’s world, wherein inequality is all-pervasive and most would prefer to ignore it. Tomorrow’s Unforgiving Sun confronts this disquiet, recognizing that the only way we as a society can move forward is by calling our collective demons by name and facing them down together.
The Red Army is hopeful that that seminal moment, that epiphany, that crucial thrust forward, is imminent – thus, the title of the album. “What we were thinking when we finally brought all these songs to life is that there’s going to be a point in time, somewhere in the near future, where a lot of the things that we are rallying against, a lot of the things we are going up against in society will come to a tipping point,” Cooper said. “We’re moving toward a point in history where there’s going to be…a change coming. That’s why we called it Tomorrow’s Unforgiving Sun.”
Tomorrow’s Unforgiving Sun ranges from delicate to furious, all the while maintaining a cohesiveness born of hefty lyrical content and tight musicianship. The album opens with “Hey,” a gentle yet poignant protest anthem, which then gives way to a ragged, pulsating track, equally anthemic, entitled “Guns.” Listeners are shuffled back and forth between pounding and more placid for the remainder of the album in the same fashion, and a consistent passion shines through each style.
The album is indeed reminiscent of a dynamic moment, the sort that occurs just before a decision to act. It’s fraught with emotion, dashed with suppressed inner calamity, and it roars with the rabid rage of a captured animal on the verge of tearing through his restraints.
Tomorrow’s Unforgiving Sun was produced by Erik Samuelson, recorded in his local home. The boys point to Samuelson as having been enormously helpful in the year long project, guiding them with unerring skill and helping them to grow as musicians. He managed to capture the band’s desired aesthetic, a right-in-the-room-with-you-sound, and produced accordingly.
Having the chance to make the record in Athens has been quite important and influential to the band. “Living in Athens and around this area, you see all this America that’s really never coming back ever again,” Young said. “It’s very much dilapidated barns and factories, and I think that the title of the album is also a good representation of being here. Being one of 20,000 or so students concentrated in a tiny town, we don’t want this to sound like we’re coming out of L.A. or Chicago. We’re coming out of 3 Atlantic House sitting behind a Speedway in Southeastern Ohio.”
This small community has provided a microcosm of the world for The Red Army to dissect, to pull apart and examine. A track on the album entitled “727” reconstructs Athens as a desolate scene filled with homophobia and rape, issues that tend to plague this town too often.
In fact, as a band, The Red Army has had to face some of the problems that they write about. Cooper, as a black man, has found himself faced with incredulity and judgment as a performer. It seems that many can’t overcome the disbelief that Cooper could be performing anything but hip hop – once, upon arriving at a show, a patron actually voiced to him that they weren’t aware it was hip hop night.
“Talk about being realistic with a message,” Young said. “You don’t have to be a world-changer to understand that racism, sexism is extremely prevalent in your community.”
“Just as our band is a form of radical speech against an oppressive system, I feel like our presence does the same thing,” Cooper said. “Just walking into a place, and there’s a guy of Costa Rican descent, two black guys, three white guys, and everybody’s just together… our presence in Athens’ music community speaks volumes about what people can do if they get together.”
The Red Army is, in and of itself, a physical manifestation of the message they propagate – banding together for the greater good, pressing each other to question the world, holding out, together, for an answer.
“What do we as young people, together, do to make things better?” Cooper asked. “Can we do something different? Are we capable of it? The Red Army is asking the question, not telling you the answer.”
Be sure to pick up a copy of Tomorrow’s Unforgiving Sun, and add another voice to The Red Army’s revolution of “why?”
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