S A R G E N T H O U S E: Red Sparowes - The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer

Los Angeles quintet Red Sparowes offers a preview of song snippets from its forthcoming epic, heavy and sprawling third album in a video trailer posted. The disc, titled The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer will be released via Sargent House on April 6th, 2010.

There has never been as pronounced of a leap in style and scope as with Red Sparowes' latest offering. The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer maintains their layered arrangements and swirling amplified crescendos, Americana noir soundscapes (punctuated by the extended pedal steel on “In Every Mind”), and gloriously triumphant melodies (“Giving Birth to Imagined Saviors”). Earlier records focused on the larger scope of the album, but the new album is song-centered, with the individual tracks harboring stronger independent identities. And where previous endeavors found the band propelled by enormous walls of sound, they now temper their monolithic progressions with distinct passages of separated and soft-spoken instrumentation. Red Sparowes were suspiciously absent from the playing field over the last three years, and now it’s apparent that they were busy drafting the grandest statement and finest achievement of their existence.

Thunderheads storming across the prairie, outraged students taking to the streets, migratory herds stampeding along the tundra--any number of images could describe the grandiose scope of Red Sparowes’ lush vignettes. Wielding both a master’s sense of nuance and an outsider artist’s unhindered expressionist zeal, the Los Angeles quintet created a catalog of haunting and hallucinatory guitar orchestrations over the course of the millennium’s opening decade. With two albums, a string of split releases, multiple U.S. and European tours, and a number of line-up changes under their belt, Red Sparowes are currently poised to release their third album and most impressive creation to date, The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer.

Though Red Sparowes’ music thrives unbound by narrative, the band provides a roadmap to their muse. Their 2005 debut album, At The Soundless Dawn, cast the scientific inevitability of the Sixth Extinction into a grand funeral oration, revealing the message within the individual track titles. Their second full-length, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun (2006) provided a synopsis of the Great Sparrow campaign of the Great Leap Forward, laying bare its conceptual role. The Aphorisms EP (2008 digital, 2009 12" vinyl) served a thematic precursor to the next album.

Red Sparowes' latest offering, The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer, began with the larger existential pondering of truth, faith, order, causality, and the innate demand for an understanding of the larger world around us. While Red Sparowes’ majesty is hardly in need of story, the provision of the larger metaphor yields a heightened depth and gravity to their work.

Red Sparowes consists of guitarist/keyboardist Bryant Clifford Meyer (also of Isis), bassist/pedal steel player Gregory Burns (ex-Halifax Pier), drummer David Clifford (ex-Pleasure Forever), guitarist/keyboardist Andy Arahood (ex-Angel Hair) and guitarist Emma Ruth Rundle (also of The Nocturnes). The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer was recorded August - September 2009 at Infrasonic Sound by Toshi Kasai (Melvins, Big Business, Tool). Album photography and design by Greg Burns and layout by Sonny Kay.