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SOME PREACH CD/EP REVIEWS

'I don't mean to scare anyone off, but I think I'm going to mention the words 'jazz' and 'folk' here. But wait - whatever notions those words put into your mind are probably wrong, at least in the context of Red Painted Red. I'm just trying to make the point that this ain't rock 'n' roll. Far from it, kids. Instead, this four track EP paints a different picture, sometimes pastoral, sometimes dramatic, always inventive. With keening strings and skittering drums, keyboards adding detail, and strange drones and sweeps scudding in and out, this music sounds like the kind of stuff you encounter - if you're lucky - on Radio Three in the early hours, when you're flipping around the dial and everything seems haunted. Yvonne Neve enunciates disquieting post-Lewis Carroll lyrical narratives with a glassy English otherworldliness, unruffled even as the sonic landscape, with all its odd inhabitants, crowds around her. The disembodied laughter and gasps, as if a threatening world is closing in, on 'My Friend' is downright unsettling, but her vocal remains the strangely serene heart of the song. 'Preach' is a piano-led psalm, the voices of sampled preachers - frightening in their unruffled certainty - weaving in and out of Yvonne Neve's own vocal, which here abandons serenity to creep inexorably through neurosis, towards an agitated mania. It's almost a relief when the song winds down, although I'm left wondering if the madness got her in the end. Red Painted Red conjure deceptively dark ambiences out of sunlight and green fields: they evoke the puckish sprites in the corners of your vision, the monsters under your bed. Pastoral never seemed so perturbing'(NEMESIS TO GO)

'With Red Painted Red, they continuously please fans of arcane melodies with their second EP, Preach. An organ-like synthesized piano calmly starts "Let's Go," which is a song of seduction and questioning. It's haunting and beautiful and could soothe the delusional, lead a funeral march, or be background at a casual get-together. It embodies many tones and emotions, and it contains many moods that grace different occasions. Poetry graces the introduction of "My Friend" as respiratory gasps from lungs deprived of air and comfort are interspersed throughout the track to make it all the more chilling, inviting for ghostly energy. It's delectable in an eerie way. "A Book" sounds as if a set of musicians who died long ago on a stage and whose remains were left with their instruments were resurrected and continued to play where they left off, despite being covered by spider webs and dust. The track holds history, ancient tones, and paints a solemn beauty on an aural canvas. "Preach" is like a long farewell to a lost loved one at the burial site. It's passionate yet eloquent in its poetic delivery. Tears are shed towards the end of the track as it is accompanied by a gentle piano and other soothing instruments, as if the departed soul attempts to soften the pain of those in mourning. Red Painted Red dips a toe in the pools of the macabre, but only skids around the edges of its murky depths. The band has gothic tendencies but only falls so far into the genre. Their sound is eloquent and unique. The duo states that despite all of the musical comparisons they receive, they "refute it all;" not one musician sounds quite like them. Red Painted Red expresses extreme musical passion through this small, but lovely sample of their inventive and dedicated sound.'(REGEN)

SOME PATHWAY CD/EP REVIEWS

'Devotees of Obscure Stuff From Quite A Few Years Ago might recall a band from Manchester called Mantra, who put out two albums of splendidly, incongruously, assertively ethereal atmospherics, before vanishing headlong into the Where Are They Now? file. Well, now two thirds of Mantra are back, in the guise of Red Painted Red. This four-song EP, neatly and unconventionally packaged in a gatefold paper sleeve, is their first release. Although fans of Mantra will greet the overall sound of the band with a smile of recognition, Red Painted Red are not simply a continuation of Mantra by other means. They're a bit more of an upfront proposition, accosting the listener with their rolling, skipping, sidling, glitch-classical torch songs and jazz punk ballads. The essential feeling is reserved, yet urgent. Vocalist Yvonne Neve's voice is produced to sound up close, intimate. In fact, if you turn your back on your hi-fi during 'Flower' it sounds like she's right there in the room with you, a downright unsettling experience. 'Radionoise' churns up a reggae lope, and progressively builds to a teetering stack of noise, as shuddering, shredded guitar and effects are piled up and up. Red Painted Red certainly know how to build a wall of sound - and then they'll poke holes in it with a vocal sharpened to a point. I'm pleased to see that the band are just as far out on their own limb as Mantra ever were, and still as utterly unique. This isn't pop music, you know. This is the sound of DNA spirals unwinding.' (NEMESIS TO GO)

'This four-song EP will give you chills and leave you drooling... for more.Manchester, UK songwriters Yvonne Neve and Simon Carroll, formerly of the band Mantra, are back, having released the Pathway EP as the first in a trio of EPs under the moniker Red Painted Red. The EP itself - seemingly splattered with red ink like paint or blood - is housed in an album of artwork depicting a murder of crows alongside a droopy zombie girl, certainly catching your attention at first glance. The four-song CD is a vehicle for the duo's poetic vision, a cynical mix of pain (literally, epitomized in the wrist-cutting "Pathway"), loneliness (via "Radionoise"), the loss of childhood innocence ("Flower," which may be the reason for the album's bold cover art), and lastly, life versus death ("Sleep," a fitting end for an emotionally charged collection). The EP begins in reverse with a recorded melody physically replayed in reverse, overlaid with piano or synth keys and a warm, inviting female voice. Neve leads us down a musical path of atmospheric storytelling, crunchy percussion, and perfectly textured synth sounds. Vibrant with similarities to Siouxsie Sioux and the trip-pop of Portishead, the album moves onward to "Radionoise," which is not that at all. The track has a gentleness of jazz and lounge influences, like velvety liquor on the rocks. Also rebelling from its seemingly harmless song title, "Flower" evokes a roughness and industrial influence with a unique Jamaican beat and vocal vibrato heard only from others in the dark genre like the women of Rasputina. The EP ends too soon, though, with "Sleep," a lovelorn solo that would suit any forlorn, off-Broadway musical. Really, Red Painted Red's Pathway EP will turn your head and leave you desiring an actual full-length album from the musical pair.' (REGENMAG)

"MOVING, DISTURBING, BEAUTIFUL" April 14, 2007 BY COCA-EBOLA

MANTRA-EVERY DEFECT

'First things first: this has to be one of the ten best albums of the 1990s. I don't make such claims casually - rest assured that this record is unique enough to qualify. One with unusual influences on display - on their PAINTED RED debut it was possible to discern the shoegazing guitar sound, some Kate Bush (piano usage, unusual turns of phrase), some Kristin Hersh (emotional intensity), Cranes' way of combining dissonance and ethereality, Miranda Sex Garden's ability to do the same whilst integrating strings. With this album Mantra created their own sound - the above influences are far less relevant. All the songs here are piano-based - and the piano lines are peculiarly elegant and eloquent throughout. Guitars, as before, are used as orchestration, often adding an undercurrent of industrial dissonance. Almost all the songs are slow-paced. Chamber-ensemble like string charts crop up frequently. The most startling thing about the album, instrumentally speaking, is its prominent use of double-reeds (i.e oboe, english horn). They're not particularly used to prettify the music or act a exotic saxophone substitutes, they sound (certainly on "Our Disease" and "Catcher") like credible rock instruments. Yvonne Neve's vocals are quite remarkable - while she does slightly resemble PJ Harvey (upper register) and Katy Carr or Siouxsie Sioux (lower register), she's more controlled, more precise, than any of them. The lyrics are exceptional. Someone described the album as a lengthy diatribe against a partner, but while a turbulent relationship is certainly being described, there's far more to these songs than that. The lyrics don't always make literal sense, but they're full of arresting images: consider firstly the unusual sexual innuendo throughout "Rage" (the only hard rock song on the album, with appropriately carnal vocals), and the alter-ego or inner-demon "playing at lives with cars...drinking the tar in my lungs" in "Catcher" (in which the oboeist provides the most memorable instrumental hook on the album). Is the album about a couple dying of AIDS? A wild thought, but "disease" imagery is everywhere - not only that exceptionally haunting song "Our Disease", but just as prominently in the exquisite "The Making Of Me" and the more menacing spoken piece "Coma": in both she seems to be anticipating imminent death from the disease she shares with her partner. In individual songs, and throughout the album, she's alternately angry and despairing, dominant ("when I want you I expect to have you...when I ask I expect you to answer yes") and tender (the whole song "Lovers"), indomitable and sexually lethal ("let me anesthetize you with my poison"; whole songs like "I Feel Free" and the gorgeous "Frail" which is lyrically anything but frail) and then desperately vulnerable (especially the sweetly soulful "Hymn"). You feel for her and fear for her - Mantra have never released another album: you have to ask ..Yvonne, are you alright? are you even still with us?' But maybe she wouldn't appreciate the attention - the second title song ("..Of' Every Defect"), the only one to feature a danceable beat and sequenced synthesizers, could be read as a warning to fans to keep their distance. I guess I haven't conveyed the uniqueness of the album, but there's only so much words can say. In conclusion, we the fans are keeping our distance, but still waiting - for more news of the band and the singer, and even (we hardly dare hope) another album that's ALMOST as moving, disturbing and profoundly beautiful as this one.' (COCA-EBOLA)