Guillemots - Red (2008)

1) Kriss Kross; 2) Big Dog; 3) Falling Out of Reach; 4) Get Over It; 5) Clarion; 6) Last Kiss; 7) Cockateels; 8) Words; 9) Standing on the Last Star; 10) Don’t Look Down; 11) Take Me Home

Mixed bag by design, but the combined brilliance of the band's creative minds strikes through.

Key tracks: "Kriss Kross", "Cockateels", "Standing on the Last Star"

Ideally I’d like to tackle every album on its own merits, but in order to talk about Red you first need to at least briefly mention Through the Windowpane, Guillemots’ debut album, as the former is so tied to the latter’s legacy. Through the Windowpane is a very immaculately and in-all-honesty perfectly crafted album, a stunning masterpiece of composition where each song inhibits a special place in the greater whole. It was also an album that was largely created under the vision and craftsmanship of Guillemots’ front man, Fyfe Dangerfield. The other members definitely had their imprint on it, but it was clear who was in charge based on the writing credits alone, where only three songs are attributed to the band as a whole and two of those were the interludes. Red is a complete 180 degree flip – only two songs have come solely from Dangerfield’s pen, with the rest having been credited to the whole quartet. This is where the key difference between the two albums comes to play. Instead of repeating the magic of the debut, Guillemots decided to take full advantage of the group’s rather unique cast of members - an international collective with backgrounds in classical training, noise music, indie rock, jazz and hip-hop, all collaborating together to create their combined idea of pop music. Red, then, could be called a debut of sorts for Guillemots as a whole. It’s an album created as a team, every member participating equally in the brainstorming and encouraging everyone to bring forth their unique points of view. It’s only natural to compare Red to its predecessor because it intentionally takes such a great distance to what came before.

Red is all about throwing different things all over the place and giving every colour in the palette a go. Where Windowpane placed great emphasis on grandiose beauty and sweeping melodies, Red just does whatever it feels like. The humongous, life-affirming anthems are still present but this time they’ve been mixed together everything from RnB-influenced pop eccentricities to loud and noisy walls of sound, with Dangerfield intentionally stepping back to clear more room for the other members’ voices (including literally, with Magrao and Hawkes taking lead vocals in the crunchy, hard-hitting  "Last Kiss"). There’s no consistency, not even an attempt at it, and that’s the intention. In its place are wild whimsicality and a dash of mad creativity - “Cockateels” has the feel of a movie soundtrack cue turned into a musical number with Bollywood choirs thrown in for good measure, “Clarion” sounds like a Chinese children’s song played by a cartoon disco group and “Big Dog” spices its falsetto-lead pop stabs with sampled bat sounds and , to name a few examples. Red is a madhouse where earnest pop songs filled with tearjerkingly lovely melodies co-exist with the kind of sonic experiments that most bands would hide away on EPs and b-sides, and they all hold hands together.

If you draw an issue with this, Red is going to be a rough ride. The band appear to be on an intentional mission to destroy Through the Windowpane’s legacy, deciding that rather than to try to follow up what many already called a modern classic when it came out, going for something completely different was a far better choice of action. Remnants of the debut flash occasionally but they’re few and far between, and you might as well be looking at a release from a different band for all it’s worth - but what a band this new quartet is. Red may re-invent itself with each song but most of those songs are actually really, really good and the band behind them is beams with inspired energy, and while the sounds they use may be brand new, Guillemots still know a thing or two or several about amazing melodies and how to craft massive songs. Red largely bounces from highlight to highlight and if anything, the way each song plays out completely differently to everything else just emphasises the special nature of each. The tracklist is a checklist of exciting highlights, from the beautiful (“Standing on the Last Star”, “Take Me Home”) to the anthemic (“Kriss Kross”, “Cockateels”), from rocking and roaring (“Don’t Look Down”, “Last Kiss”) to just plain fun (“Big Dog”, “Clarion”). In fact, only two songs clearly show the shortcomings that could have affected Red in a larger way in less capable hands. The jazzy ballad “Words” feels like re-heated Windowpane leftovers and goes to show why not making a close-knit follow-up for it was probably a good bet, while the lead single “Get Over It” is a bit of an aimless ruckus covered by a shiny radio slickness that doesn’t really suit it. If you ever get a chance, try to hear a live version of the song somewhere: the rougher, beefed-up version they unleashed during concerts reveals what they were aiming for with the song, and how the studio version fails to achieve it.

But it’s a small niggle. For all purposes, Red is at the very least an interesting attempt of a band trying to re-establish and re-invent themselves. It does have the sound of a practice round and a transitional album, something that becomes even clearer in hindsight through the albums after it: their sound is heavily influenced by a lot of the elements explored in Red, but refined into a finer, more thought-out form. But as far as transitional practice rounds go, Red comes out pretty strongly. It’s definitely a mess of an album and really, really obviously in a completely different ball park to the debut they made their name with, but the band still has that same magically inspired way of creating music and when it clicks - and it often does - the schizophrenic style-flipping doesn’t matter. When the startlingly different opener “Kriss Kross” changes its tone from a moody, aggressive bull-fight pounder to a far more bittersweet guise filled with vulnerably longing beauty in its final set of climaxes (plural, indeed), and then suddenly shifts gears again right after it, it’s clear that while the sounds may have changed, the same great creative minds are still behind it all.

Rating: 8/10