Red Sparowes - Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Sun: The second album from this instrumental metal quintet is a conceptual piece aiming at telling the the story of China's great sparrow campaign, part of the Great Leap Forward. In the 50s, Mao Zedong initiated a pest-killing program that he believed would lead to much more productive harvests. Field workers would bang pots and pans to keep sparrows flying until they died. You can probably imagine the outcome - sure, it worked for one year, but then, with all the sparrows dead, locusts swarmed unabated and caused a great famine.
Anyway, high-concept or not, the music is instrumental so it doesn't really matter, does it? Red Sparowes are a heady mix of the paranoid blast of Neurosis, Pelican, and Isis, minimalist repetitive pattern obsessions of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, and even touches of 80s goth guitar hero Robert Smith of the Cure here and there - and manages to shoehorn in a complete metal oddity, pedal steel guitar. Their previous album, At the Soundless Dawn, has grown to be a favorite of mine over the past year - I sure hope this one will follow suit.
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