It’s not staggered, but there’s definitely a bit of tension-building technique guiding every note of “Rollaway” out of the speakers and into our minds this January. Go to Space Die’s debut album Red Air Don’t Care is filled with a tense, atmospheric rock of the purely instrumental variety, and while the absence of lyrics leaves the ultimate narrative here open to interpretation, there’s no arguing over the emotional depth of the tracklist – it’s quite impressive indeed. Red Air Don’t Care borrows slightly from the post-metal movement of the mid-2000s, but make no mistakes about this record; it’s a powerful LP on its own, and not the product of hero worship that a lot of progressive efforts have become in the past ten years.
BANDCAMP: https://gotospacedie.bandcamp.com/album/red-air-dont-care
“Spring Ahead” clocks in at close to six minutes total, and its dueling guitars make it feel like one of the more stacked compositions on the whole of the album. The lumbering grooves in this piece are fantastic, but I don’t know that they’re any more enamoring than the melodic dissonance atop which we find the song “Air and Land” built. “Air and Land” benefits from a very pensive arrangement, but as is the case with the tracks it’s sandwiched between – “Spring Ahead” and the introductory “Threes Away” – this only serves to make the natural pressure in the music that much more enticing. There’s no pressing stop once you get into the guts of this LP, and that isn’t what I normally expect from a debut album.
“Way Up” has the most radio-ready feel to its bones, but when juxtaposed with “Queen D,” I don’t think it’s nearly as heavy nor cosmetically flashy as it could have been. Not every song here has the rockstar mentality sewn into its structure; “Jumpinthelake” smolders with a much more ambient layer to its construction than any of the other material on Red Air Don’t Care does, but its throbbing, punkish demeanor thirty seconds into its running time suggests just as much volatility simmering beneath the surface of these cosmetics. One goal is more important than any other for Go to Space Die in this album, and that’s getting us as integrated with the presence of the music in the air as possible, and I think that goal was met right out of the gate in “Threes Away.”
Whether it’s the jarring, sharp tonality of “Sheets” or the gut-punching groove of “Queen D,” you can count on a lot of thunderous rock energy in Red Air Don’t Care from Go to Space Die this month, and if this is just a taste of what’s still to come from this project, you can sign me up for more right now. Instrumental records are often thought of as an acquired taste, but I can’t really imagine anyone who loves quality composing and surgically precise execution taking issue with any of the included content in Red Air Don’t Care. It’s truly an impeccable effort, and likely not the last hit this one-man unit will turn in before returning to his main gig as the drummer for Murder by Death.
Claire Uebelacker