There's A Star Above The Manger Tonight [Vinyl]

With their final album, Chicago-based quartet Red Red Meat completed a journey started in the early ‘90s, concluding a study in evolution, moving from their shambolic blues rock roots into an experimental combo capable of synthesizing “a field recording with a Can aesthetic. Yet, There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight is the sound of a band blooming even as it folds in – finding Tim Rutilli, Brian Deck, Ben Massarella, and Tim Hurley incorporating samplers, loops, and computers, marrying disparate threads of hip-hop, Krautrock, and dub to “folk forms, stomp and blues business.”\n\n“As a single piece of music it was kind of a real demonstration of where Red Red Meat was at the time, crossed with everything that we were playing around with that would eventually become Califone,” Massarella says. Self-produced in DIY fashion in the back room of BJ’s Truck Stop, located located in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago near the seedy stockyards, where the band’s members did double time washing out meat trucks, the record features moments of sublime beauty welded to abrasive noise. “A lot of times I remember being in that back room working on music, and when that bell rang we’d run out and work on a truck,” Rutili says. “We were covered in blood at that job. There was always blood. T(more...)