Another Review in Brief, finally. Yes, I'm finally writing about Red, after highlighting gokusanzokami's AMV featuring "Start Again." I've been listening to this album for a week now, and, as you might guess, it's grown on me.
Overall, it's a kind of music I've started calling "orchestral metal" or "orchestral electronica" -- rich, heavy-textured sound, strong melodies, and the kind of over-the-top emotionalism that I happen to love. It's also, I think, necessary to drive the vocals over the instrumentals. This is not a function of relative volume, but intensity -- and Mike Barnes, who sings lead, delivers.
The high point for me is still "Start Again" -- sorry, but that is just my kind of song, and it's not atypical of their material. The band seems to occupy, to my mind at least, territory somewhere between Linkin Park and Nickelback. (And that probably explains why I like them.)
There's a dark cast to a lot of the songs, which approach the degree of loss and angst that you'll find in Linkin Park. (I'm sorry to keep comparing like this, but I'm trying to build some context.) The lyrics aren't as angry -- there's a lot more of honest pain. These are all, ultimately, love songs, but there's an element of need in them that adds poignancy, which might seem an odd quality to find in heavy metal, but it's there.
They don't hit the layers of sound that Linkin Park or Back Street Boys manage, or even Nickelback -- it's pretty straightfoward, musically, with not a lot of the polyphony that I enjoy in the vocals by those groups -- that all happens in the instrumentals.
I have a feeling I'm going to be looking for more of their music.
Footnote: I just discovered, checking them out at Amazon, that they are a "Christian" rock band. I'm not sure what that means in this context, but I don't think it changes anything I said above. Whether the need I mentioned is for Christ or just someone to love, they're still love songs.
And I still like their music.
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