redrighthand ‘they sang and chanted for hours, then the locked-in hundreds set themselves ablaze’ CD 2011
redrighthand walked the dark trenches of sludge a few years back and they were always an awesome band to watch and listen to live. Raw, vibrant, and bleak, the down tuned guitars accentuated the visceral despair people were feeling within the punk, grindcore and sludge scene. In 2004 the band recorded this album reflecting an urgency that came with a lot of music being written at that time. Although redrighthand were firmly part of these three scenes, what they played was slower than a stoned sloth climbing across the canopy of a green silk sky.
This album is therefore a posthumous release having taken another seven years for this recording to emerge out of the gloom and into the world. As with so many releases of this type, there is always a danger the music may have dated badly resulting in the album missing the contemporary sludge boat. Well it’s time to wake up from your green induced coma motherlickers because this release is going to knock you off your feet. Sludge bands have become increasingly impotent as they turn to the easy option of slowing hardcore riffs down, in contrast this redrighthand album signals to the many where the bands have been going wrong. This does not even feel like a posthumous release, it knocks you down with a refreshing athletic slow dive punch to the head. From the moment you listen to the full majestic grimness of this album you will come to realise how shite a lot of the so-called sludge bands are nowadays. You may think redrighthand were before their time, but you would be diminishing the moment of their heaviest domination, something that I would prefer to hold onto, mainly because I have such fond memories of them ripping up a storm. Instead I like to think of this as a lesson on how to open up the wounds, caress the lesions of history and say fuck you to the mediocrity stifling the current sludge scene.
On this album we have four songs that are all similar in their attack and overall presence. Never one to let the intensity die or be subsumed by some introspective shoe gazing, “the angel of silence”, “like gold debased, like shit”, “a bodiless heart”, “this life is a monument to ruin” are unrelenting in their intensity. Each song builds on the previous track with a body count of tortured torn throat spewed aggression. Aggressive and yet refreshing, each song should be likened to having a shot of Tequila but with a subtle twist, rather than putting salt on the side of your hand you place crushed glass. Feel it rip through your digestive tract, let the tone, the depth, the coverage of the mammoth produced, peel your eyelids to the back wall. Succumb to the pain and the pleasure redrighthand offers up. This is a thing of dark eroticism crushed by a savage embrace, and within all this discomfort focus on the production of beauty and foreboding.
Just one thing I would like to request after listening to this release for days…will redrighthand please reform so I can once again watch them tear the world apart? If you think you know your shit when it comes to sludge you should have already bought a copy of this beast, if you haven’t bought a copy all I need to ask is why haven’t you? Fuck free downloads and support the label. For all of you who didn’t see them back when they were terrorizing the UK, redrighthand were truly an awesome band, and unusually for a release, this really captures what you missed. This blows my mind! Earth shatteringly good!!!!
Label: At War With False Noise
Website: http://theysangandchantedforhours.blogspot.com/
Scribed by: Pete Hamilton-Giles
