4 out of 5

When Red Sparowes popped onto the scene with At the Soundless Dawn, their musical lineage was enough to grab my attention and my money.  But my acclaims were withheld; the “most beautifullest loudest metallest thing ever” descriptors the glowing press was glomming onto the band didn’t ring true to me.  Sparowes were undeniably distinctive – a criticism I had against the also-emerging-at-the-time Russian Circles – their slide guitar a notably unique addition and their general sound warmer than that of their peers’, but the compositions still sort of languished in blase to me, nibbling at their Isis influence but shoegazing off toward the horizon in lieu of settling on a hook.

Opener (ahem) “The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like a Mighty Storm, Suddenly and Furiously Blinding Our Senses.” on Every… rather changes the game right away, an immediate and bracing (and sprawling) guitar riff carried o’er mountains of building intensity via thudding drums.  While the album, overall, is missing some connective tissue (and I can’t quite claim to get the sense of narrative they aim for), this invigorated sensibility is mostly maintained; the non-solo glittering guitar line approach and the slide feel more organic within the song’s structures (as opposed to almost restraining elements), buoying the group between bursts of intensity.  And this might be a bullshit assessment, but let’s talk about the company kept: The debut, on Neurot, carried along the Neurot tendencies of icier soundscapes, and had a Neurot dude – Desmond O’Shea – as engineer.  This album popped up on Sargent House, home to a lotta’ loud and a lotta’ wank, but more encouraging, in general, of boastful productions, such as “every” producer Tim Green might’ve been used to with bands like Fucking Champs.  So we had more appealing conditions for rockin’ out, is my suggestion.

Still, the album sometimes seems at a loss what to do with this energy.  After the bombastic opener, “We Stood Transfixed in Blank Devotion as Our Leader Spoke to Us, Looking Down on Our Mute Faces with a Great, Raging, and Unseeing Eye.” holds onto a rather promising riff for several minutes before finally letting it loose, but then the group just toys with it in an oddly tense-less push and pull for the song’s remainder; the awesome bluesy swagger of ” “Annihilate the Sparrow, That Stealer of Seed, and Our Harvests Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In.” ” similarly feels wasted on the song’s underwhelming second half.  We also hit something of a holding pattern in “Millions Starved and We Became Skinnier and Skinnier, While Our Leaders Became Fatter and Fatter.” before the group goes out with an appreciatively building bang on “Finally, as That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That True Enemy Was the Voice of Blind Idolatry; and Only Then Did We Begin to Think for Ourselves.”  And yes, I included those full titles just for posterity.  (And YOU.)  These highlighted songs are far from poor, they just lack the appealing punch of the remaining of the album.

“Every….” is great proof of why it pays to hang around sometimes.  Some group’s pedigree may only pay off down the road; whether it was a lark or the alignment of label / producer factor, red sparowes second album was, to my ears, a vast improvement over the first, while still maintaining the elements that separated the instrumental group from the Isis / pelican soundalikes out there.