aRternative

Time is of the essence. People rushing through the street, their steps knocking faster and faster against the plaster. Always faster. Do you ever have time to stop to think? I've heard these lines a couple of times before. Everybody complains about the pace of our age, but I didn't believe it. And now, as I'm starting to turn into an adult, I feel it. I'm "out" all day, coming here, going there, university, driving license, family, friends, loved ones. I never have time for things that really deserve it. I feel lonely. I feel homeless. In the greatest home of us all, the world.

Have you ever stopped to set aside everything and think?

The essential need of a thinking man is to question. Question anything and everything: theories, dogmas, propaganda, commercials, teachers, fathers and so on. What was the greatest thing you've ever questioned? Your parents? Your teachers? Your friends? Your boyfriend/girlfriend? Your government? Your nation?

Red sparowes questions possibly the greatest thing: the driving force of humanity

We are talking about an instrumental quintet from the US and actuality is provided by the recent release of their third album, entitled The Fear is Excruciating, but Therein Lies the Answer. The genre of their music is post rock, which is usually unkown to the greater public. As the name suggests, it is an "evolved" subgenre of rock, thus it mostly consists of guitars. Its uniqueness lies firstly in its high level of serious emotional and intellectual charge, secondly in the unusual length of songs ranging from a minimum of 6 minutes to an unlimited maximum, but rarely exceeding the 30 minutes marker. As it has been mentioned before, Red Sparowes plays instrumental music without lyrics, but the song titles themselves accurately convey the message of the band. Their previous two albums At the Soundless Dawn and Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun had the "story" told by their overly verbous song titles like A Brief Moment of Clarity Broke through the Deafening Hum but It was Already Too Late or The Great Leap Forward Poured Down upon Us One Day like a Mighty Storm, Suddenly and Furiously Blinding Our Senses. The new album, released on April 6th, has short titles like In Illusions of Order or A Mutiny, so the idea behind it had to be told some other way. The band included a short piece of writing in the booklet of the disc with thoughts that hit hard in the readers' mind like a stone thrown into water. It is basically a strong critique of the general human mental attitude that demands answers before understanding the questions themselves or before making sure that there is a question at all. It brings up examples of cases where the human mind sought order and system so eagerly that it created one where there was nothing but random chance.

An overwhelming majority of mankind is driven by the urge to find answers and apply logic and reason to a world in which none exists. Red Sparowes questions this quest for order and the way it does brings immense spiritual uncertainty to the open-minded reader. Is there truly no system in the happenings of nature and life? Are we truly chasing illusions created by ourselves? If yes, what would be the appropriate behavior? Accepting whatever comes our way and try to get the best out of it? According to Red  Sparowes, yes. We should lay all our belief and trust in ourselves and only ourselves. Humanity is the only factor that always has reasons and logic, no matter how twisted they might be. Everything else is just an endless flow of randomized events. This is utterly fearful, I admit. Allow me to quote the final paragraph of the Red Sparowes text as a closing thought:

As you have probably guessed from the stepping stones of our common path here at aRternative, your humble guide is a huge collector of less-known musical delicacies usually from the darker side. I am also one of the very few remaining specimens of a species that is threatened by extinction: the music buyer. In our Internet and download dominated world, some might find it weird or at least unusual that the words 'buy' and 'music' are placed side by side in the same expression, but I can assure you that there are creatures out there that are ready to give money for their beloved audiodreams. Most of today's human population would regard me insane upon knowledge of the ridiculous amounts of money I "occasionally" spend upon certain musical outbursts, but all of us have our very own insanities, don't we?

I am obsessed with the packaging of cds and words like digipak, digibook or box set. I can sit and hold a new release in my hand examining it thoroughly for 20 or 30 minutes before even opening it. If I have something new, I usually carry it in my bag for a week, just to be able to touch it or take a look at it every then and now. I know, I'm obsessed.

My latest object of obsession is the new full-length of a highly influential and unique band: The Dillinger Escape Plan. Their previous album, Ire Works, released in 2007, is one of the most musically and technically complex pieces of art I've ever encountered, yet it carries surprisingly deep emotions of the truest kind. Thus, I was anticipating the release of their new opus and have been hunting for any information about it as early as last December. "Obviously", I preordered it as soon as the title, Option Paralysis, was announced. Even more obviously, I preordered a very special and limited box set edition, containing a surprising amount of creative and cool but totally useless paraphernalia.

When it landed in my mailbox one day after the official release date, I couldn't wait to get home and lay my hands on it. The unwrapping and opening of the box is always a ritual, so it has been now. (If you go to youtube, you can find lots of videos of uncoverings of various expensive devices like iPhones, BlackBerrys, cameras and whatsoever. I'm not that crazy, I just took a photo of the box before opening.) I marvelled at every little detail of this massive and uniquely designed, innovatively built box. It is divided into four rectangular canister-like partitions and two flat ones. The four small partitions each encase pieces of the aforementioned paraphernalia: a huge flag, a beanie hat, a luggage tag, five pins and a TV-B-Gone, each having the The Dillinger Escape Plan logo. 

Perhaps this final one needs some explanation. A TV-B-Gone is a small keychain remote control with one button that is capable of switching almost any annoying TV anywhere on or off. One of the two flat partitions contain the actual album on a disc that is special in itself, one side of it being a regular compact disc, the other being a traditional vinyl containing a bonus track titled Heat Deaf. The other flat part of the box contains a picture book, which was very confusing at first. Each and every page has almost the same images on it, and I was beginning to wonder whether it was misprinted, when I noticed the word 'flip' on the first page. As it turned out, the book is a flipbook, like the images we used to draw on the corners of our notebooks in secondary school and which yield a primitive motion picture if flipped through fast enough. This flipbook gives a fragment of the music video for the first track, Farewell, Mona Lisa. (Those, who can't endure the first 10 seconds of the actual song should jump to 1:53.)

You must be really curious about what sort of music is inside such a luxurious, creative and complex packaging, and I can assure you that the music itself possesses each of these features. It is usually labelled mathcore orr jazzcore but probably these genres don't mean a lot to you. Well, it is a rather challenging task to descirbe the band's music for lay people, but I'll try my best. Upon first listening, it sounds chaotic and meaningless to the extremes, but that is what yields it attractive power. You have to listen to it over and over again to get to know it. It is mostly built up of elements of extreme metal, classic hardcore and jazz, but traces of electronic or acoustic music can be found in it as well. It paints a very diverse and aggressive picture if you don't delve deep enough into it. After 8-10 listenings, it starts to open up and give out its real emotional values. The singer, Greg Puciato's voice is unusually versatile, ranging from totally insane and throat-killing screaming to incredibly high-pitched and soft clean vocals. One of the best songs to represent this diversity is Widower. The lyrics of songs like Endless Endings, Widower, I wouldn't If You didn't, or Parasitic Twins are painfully true and sung by Puciato... I sometimes find tears slowly running down my face. But yeah, it's just the wind.

I warmly recommend Option Paralysis (or at least Widower and Parasitic Twins) to anyone who seeks emotional journeys and is willing to take the time to tame this insane beast built around fragile bones.