Really Red - Teaching You the Fear

About eighty bands in six years, from '78 to '83; on average some fifteen debutants a season who made it to release: these are the numbers behind the Texas rock-hardcore scene, of which Really Red, from Houston, were among the foremost representatives.

If it's true that outside of Los Angeles there was no pure, unadulterated hardcore (which can also be identified with so-called beach-punk), it's equally true that Texas was a hotbed of experimental and often remarkable post-hardcore bands. The dance was opened, in Austin, by Dicks and Big Boys. The former with the anthem "Dicks Hate The Police" and an evolution that anticipated grunge by several years, the latter with their fiery and varied cacophonies, set the coordinates for what can be called the Texas-sound, a lineage running through Butthole Surfers to Scratch Acid, and culminating, in Chicago, with Jesus Lizard (who can also be taken as the highest peak of this far-from-mythical Texas-sound).

The "Texas-sound" or "Texas-core" can be said to consist of a garage-rock built on obsessive rhythms, never as fast as those of hardcore, and on the transfiguring tonalities typical of the most diabolical blues. On this root, variations and nuances abound, often showing deep knowledge and skillful use of the whole rock tradition. And an encyclopedia of rock, hallucinated under the black sun of Texas, is what Jesus Lizard would become.

Specifically, the Texan bands drew on three directions: American blues-rock cacophony (from Captain Beefheart, to Red Crayola and Pere Ubu, to 13th Floor Elevators – the first rockers out of Austin); the sickest strain of English new wave (Joy Division – and above all, though they weren't English, Birthday Party); and Californian hardcore – more absorbed and left behind than imitated or carried forward.

Preceded by two singles ("Crowd Control" / "A Corporate Setting" from August 1979 and "Modern Needs" / "White Lies" from May 1980) and an EP (Despise Moral Majority, February 1981), Really Red's debut album came out in October 1981.

Teaching You the Fear (18 tracks, 40 minutes), while largely reworking material from the singles and EP that preceded it, is a record without a single weak spot, a 360-degree mirror of its era, and thanks to its precise, clean, meticulous sound, still effective today. A parade of frantic tracks that never quite explode (systematically left to implode instead). Everything is held back, lost in whirls of clipped riffs, grandiloquent bass lines, and oddly varied rhythms, rather than reaching for any kind of catharsis. It is, after all, survival music — after the protest, after the destabilizing attempt of new wave.

Rich and skilfully pared down, chiselled, every track carries inextinguishable qualities and, like the blues, is conceived as all-encompassing and therefore as ever-relevant. That there are no melodies (nor harmonies), that there are no standout songs, that there are no songs at all, hardly needs saying. The value of each piece lies precisely in this. Even the will to communicate meaning is reduced to a minimum (the lyrics are more static and pro-forma than anything else). Rather, the aim is to absorb the Texan world (of landscape and of spirit) in its totality and, each time, to re-present it whole and, above all, unintelligible. This is music meant as backdrop, not as filter. In the end what emerges is a sense of survival in the desert – which, in this case, is the city. Experimentation, humour, the training ground of claustrophobia and depression, the evocation of unsuspected myths (as is the case with Nico) dictate the pace of this survival. Music that is, without doubt, not for teenagers. It speaks to bitterness and introspection more befitting middle age.

The architecture of Really Red rests chiefly on John Paul Williams's bass, capable of calibrating all the band's blends. Williams himself also tries his hand at piano on the more elaborate arrangements. U-Ron Bond's versatile voice is fully in line with the canons of the era: hoarse, deathly – alienated in order to exorcise alienation, though, not to embrace it. The quartet's skill (Robert Weber's drumming is what you'd call metronomic; Kelly Younger's guitar knows every trick of the past and is already preparing new ones for the future) is also evident in the fact that the band self-produced the album.

"Too Political?" is the last tribute to the hardcore season; a humanitarian version of Fear who, in full hardcore idealism, repeat: "No more ghettos!". Already "The Fee", fast, short, fierce as a hardcore track, shows however that the genre is completely surpassed – through the sheer force of simulating, sharpening and embellishing its forms. The same goes for "Pigboy" (a masterclass in dismantling hardcore from within), where, as ever, the precision and skill of the rhythm section alone is enough to set the sonic table.

The rest of the tracks offer pyrotechnic effects, since they consist of a transplant (and an articulation) of many forms dear to English new wave (Bauhaus on one side and Pop Group on the other), set within the brutal Texan context. Every track is a constant working of the rhythm section, which, imaginative in itself, leaves room for the singer's declamatory flights of fancy or for dissonant guitar textures (whose weave is all the more original and intelligent the further it recedes into the background: see "Reminder"), piano (as in "Aim Tastes Good"), saxophone (as in "No Art In Houston", the most overtly experimental track), synthesizer (as in "Teaching You the Fear" and "Entertainment"). "Decay", "Ain't No Time" and "Reminder" could be considered the album's most typical and successful expressions, carrying just enough feeling that, while it doesn't quite amount to full-blown melody, at least gestures towards it (note, especially in these tracks, the guitar, afflicted by that same epilepsy that Jesus Lizard would later carry forward). But "Starvation Dance" (which anticipates by a decade the humorous, priestly poses of Fugazi), "White Lies" (which finds its articulation in disarticulation, like a band drunk on rationality), "Run 'Em Out" and "Prostitution" (which have nothing to envy in the most cerebral miniatures of Minutemen) leave no room for exclusion in a record with the solidity of rock itself.

With Teaching You The Fear, Really Red also offered, among other things, a model of post-hardcore to which figures crucial to the survival of rock music – such as Naked Raygun and above all Steve Albini – owe no small debt. Indeed, Albini could be called the most important interpreter of the Texan sound outside of Texas. Even further down the line (in the late Eighties), it's hardly a coincidence that Albini would share one of his most successful projects – Rapeman – with two members of Scratch Acid who had relocated to Chicago.

The EP New Strings For Old Puppets (1982) and the belated album Rest In Pain (Cia, 1985) – essentially a Really Red reunion – round out, without adding anything of significance, the band's discography.

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