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, but its abstract nature means different listeners can interpret Red Burns differently. The Tricknology monologue feels like the thesis, the threads of which extend across the album. There are very few albums that can communicate such complicated themes with this level of success. Red Burns ranks high, even among the dozen or so albums I would genuinely call perfect. No other album I’ve heard is this intellectually challenging, while simultaneously being this fun to listen to.