Although it’s not entirely a guitar-driven effort, there’s no discounting the contribution made by every stirring string salvo in the new album Red Air Don’t Care from Go to Space Die. From the gentle introduction we find early on in “Threes Away” to the more sizeable riffage of “Queen D,” there’s undisputedly a metallic element underlying the guitar element in both soft and sterling moments in Red Air Don’t Care, but if you’ve been as hungry for some gritty, six-string-powered intensity beside epic drumming and basslines that serve the part of a vocalist just fine on their own, this might be the album you’ve been waiting for. Go to Space Die is a side project, true, but it doesn’t feel like a one-off in this LP at all.
Rhythm is key to defining the narrative in “Air and Land,” “Way Up,” “Sheets,” and the previously noted “Queen D,” and given the absence of lyrics in this record, I think it’s all the more important to appreciate the effect that both tempo and the urgency of the instrumentation have on the mood of every song here. There’s a balance to the music that isn’t born of experimentalism alone; Go to Space Die is thoughtfully assembling the material as a suite of songs meant to be heard in a single sitting, which requires a lot more than the lashing attitude of a punk rocker, improvisational player, or anyone else normally known for rejecting the rulebook in any circumstances.
Listen to Red Air Don’t Care below
The depth of the storytelling in Red Air Don’t Care isn’t being shaped by the production quality, but I would be lying if I said the crystal clear audio we’re treated to in songs like “Spring Ahead” and “Jumpinthelake” didn’t make me dig the music here even more. There’s no searching for detail in this piece, because it’s already been fleshed out and presented at the forefront of the mix. It’s easy to see where a singer would have come in between the essence of this songcraft and the audience it was designed specifically for, and those who have an especially strong taste for instrumental music are likely to find this LP just about as addictive as any other vice you’d find from one continent to the next.
Go to Space Die submits a rather mind-blowingly meticulous and melodically charged offering in Red Air Don’t Care, and if you haven’t already given it a listen, I think you would be doing yourself a great disservice to avoid it this winter season. Taking inspiration from as much post-metal as it does some of the more avant-garde progressive works you could find in indie rock nowadays, Red Air Don’t Care doesn’t attempt to blind us with virtuosity nor pose like it’s a work of art not tethered to the foundations of raw rock n’ roll music. This is about expressing in the truest form that a musician plugged into amplifiers or sitting behind a set of drums can produce, and it’s definitely a winner in my book.
