Guillaume Apollinaire, Leonard Cohen, Shirley Chisholm, Nina Simone, Nation of Ulysses, Curtis Mayfield, New York Dolls, Chinua Achebe, Upton Sinclair, Walt Whitman, Hunter S. Thompson, Delta 72, Oscar Wilde, Frantz Fanon, Gandhi, William Faulkner, WEB DuBois, Guadalupe Esmeralda Cortez, you and endless more...
"...Red Cortez, perhaps a perfect name for a leftist political group in the future, if such an organization is needed.
The music that this group makes ... beat poetry, ragtag clothing, the fertile hope of equality...The Walkmen, peace marches and that audacity of human content that the new president-elect has been talking about and which has been a calling card since the 60s. Guaranteed that last night was an evening that the members of Red Cortez sat rapt as the numbers across the country were tallied and marked down as official.
They are cut from a cloth that embraces the free-thinking spirit of 60s, via San Francisco and Woodstock. They tap into the liberating sense of possibility and scoff at any kinds of limitations imposed on the people of this country. They gravitate toward the melancholic dimension of the war – or any war – that’s being waged and chronicle it with a new song about a wife continuing to receive letters from her soldier husband though he’s already dead. She chooses to think of him still as a living person and the letters are all the indication she needs. Red Cortez tap into the souls of the folks they make up or relay to us, giving a warm display that feels like betterment."
-DAYTROTTER
"Red Cortez, formerly The Weather Underground, put it all out there, sweating and oozing a post punk gospel like hot candle wax at the confessional. The ten song set built up to a frenetic crescendo like a church on fire. Harley Prechtel-Cortez gave a sermon of lost love and redemption and sang, sang, sang like he’d met the devil at those country crossroads, standing up to the hundreds of faces in the crowd with a total transparency of spirit that said “Follow me to the place where we pray.”
An intelligent combination of blues, punk, 60s garage and folk, and a hint of shoe-gazer, Red Cortez brings a heritage of nuance that made me a believer.
-the deli magazine
"The crowd was different this evening, but the reaction was exactly the same: general un-enthusiasm ...and ending with utter captivation."-Laist
"...the band was explosive on this small stage. Moving from guitar to keys, bandleader Harley Prechtel-Cortez has "it." Whatever "it" is that makes someone a star, he's got it. He shimmy moonwalks across the stage, slams around and, like everyone in the band, gives it everything he's got at every moment. Playing their juiced up, rootsy gospel, foot stomping rock they had the crowd shouting and sweating. The distance this band has traveled in one short year (we first saw The Weather Underground at SXSW 2008) is remarkable. We see big things down the line for Red Cortez."
-Jambase
It was amid a general feeling of indifference that Red Cortez took the stage—and then they started playing. One by one, audience members were beaten into submission by the pure energy flowing from the four guys before them, led by the obvious aptitude of lead singer and jack-of-all-trades, Harley Prechtel-Cortez. With the epic grandeur...and the raw passion of the Shins’ James Mercer, Prechtel-Cortez belied his youthful appearance (not unlike a baby-faced Benicio del Toro with a pompadour) with his fierce command of the stage and of the refined garage-rock tunes he helped to crank out.
-PopMatters
"Eccoci quindi tornati al presente. Non molto da aggiungere a quello che ormai sapete forse a memoria. Eccoci a questo nuovo EP intitolato “Hands To The Wall” che si apre con una traccia che non avrebbe sfigurato tra i migliori lavori degli U2 del periodo degli anni ottanta e si chiude con una ballata folk sognante guidata dagli accordi di un pianoforte in netto contrasto con gli acuti più raschianti della voce di Cortez. In mezzo il sound a cui ci hanno abituato questi ragazzi, in bilico tra il pop dei Beatles e qualche accenno più ruvido che porta alla mente i Kings Of Leon di qualche anno fa. Il sound stavolta si è stabilizzato e rispecchia quello proposto con il già citato “Bird In The Hand” quindi non c’è molto altro da aggiungere perché sembra che finalmente sia stata raggiunta una dimensione ben precisa. Un suono illuminato da improvvisi raptus, veloci e sudati; un approccio sonoro rallentato poi dalle riflessioni di un romanticismo da vita vissuta in strada.
Ennesima conferma di quanto sapevamo già.
Ennesima prova che finché ci sarà gente che scrive musica come quella dei Red Cortez ci aspettano ancora ottime canzoni per il futuro."
-Indie For Bunnies
Hey, I saw you guys for the first time on Thursday night at Webster Hall in NYC. You were great!!! I wrote about you in my blog which is http://concert-log.blogspot.com/. Thanks for the great music!!!!
Just saw you guys in both Philadelphia and Washington DC.....Kick Ass shows guys!! The wife and I are looking forward to your return to the northeast!!
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