Red Burns by Standing on the Corner
Best Tracks: The whole thing
Genre: Post Jazz, Experimental
Year: 2017
The most intricate album I’ve ever heard. Red Burns is structured like a continuous story, fading between tracks like scenes of a documentary. The story feels like the account of an American folklorist exploring New York. Red Burns visits a wide variety of African and Latin American genres to paint a picture of the African Diaspora living in New York today. The album is led by a rotating cast of musicians, artists, and poets. Red Burns comes together as a collage of the personal histories and cultural identities of each of its artists.
The glue holding together such an ambitious artist collective is Slauson Malone’s production. The album slowly speeds up and slows down, dissolving into saturated delays and reforming somewhere else. Each song has been chopped into a vignette, serving to carry the listener across Red Burns’ hour-long runtime. The whole album has a hazy texture, made of analogue synths, digital distortions, and warbling acoustics.
The seamlessness of Red Burns helps connect it’s lyrics, adlibs, and poetry into a genuinely profound message. I interpret Red Burns to be about how urban culture is at odds with our humanity and freedom. The Tricknology monologue feels like the thesis to me, the threads of which extend across the album. All of the characters struggle to trust. As Red Burns and Brown Marv have split the neighbourhood with their biblical feud, hate and mistrust split us into cops, men, women, pimps, whores, black, white, etcetera. And above all that is technology: the mechanism that drains our souls, keeping us feeling distant and unsafe. Red Burns realizes the problem in an entertaining sonic masterpiece, and also does not coddle us with halcyon projections. There are very few albums that can communicate such complicated themes with this level of success. This is more focused and political than To Pimp A Butterfly, and better produced than most label-backed releases. No other album is this intellectually enriching, while simultaneously being this fun to listen to.
10/10