Red Sparowes
biography
May 23, 1958: Mao Tse Tung initiates the "Great Leap Forward", his second five-year plan for the People's Republic of China. In addition to imposing impossibly high quotas on mainland farmers (to produce both grain in their fields and shoddy steel in their backyard furnaces) the Chairman insists that the country's "four greatest evils"-rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows-must be exterminated in order to maximize production. Villagers are instructed to scream and bang pots and pans to keep the sparrows in flight until the birds die of exhaustion. Soon, the sparrow population is drastically reduced, leaving no natural predator for the country's locusts-which proceed to decimate China's crops. The result is possibly the worst famine in human history. Between 1958 and 1961, as many as 43 million Chinese die of starvation. Meanwhile, local government authorities falsify agricultural reports in order to avoid Mao's often senseless wrath. Soldiers are dispatched to villages to find grain that the peasants are accused of hiding. Thousands of villagers are tortured and murdered in the search for grain stores that never existed. When they run out of bark and grass to eat, peasants in some provinces resort to cannibalism.
The Chairman: Where is the grain? The people deceive their country. Relieve them of the ravages of the sparrow, and they welcome the havoc of the locust. What guidance will they accept, if not mine? What punishment shall I mete out, if not everything at my disposal? The Proletariat: How is it that our Leader cannot see us starving? Why do we continue to toil in vain? Is not revolution in the hearts and minds of the people? If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, perhaps we are harvesting the wrong crops.
Red Sparowes' second full-length release, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun, was inspired by the foregoing events—and a Communist propaganda poster bearing the slogan which the album takes as its title. Recorded at Louder Studios in San Francisco with producer Tim Green (Comets On Fire, The Fucking Champs, The Melvins), Every Red Heart... features performances from drummer Dave Clifford (formerly of Pleasure Forever and the VSS) and guitarist/bassist Andy Arahood (formerly of Angel Hair), both of whom had yet to join Red Sparowes when the band recorded their 2005 debut, At The Soundless Dawn. Clifford and Arahood join original members Cliff Meyer (guitar, also of ISIS), Greg Burns (bass/pedal steel, formerly of Halifax Pier) and Josh Graham (guitar, also of Battle Of Mice) in weaving a skillfully layered instrumental narrative that combines the expanse of the Sparowes' compelling live demonstrations with the incomparable fidelity and precision of studio capture.
To clarify: "I'm not a communist and we're not a political band," Burns says. "But I like that the title implies that it's not just about the band, or the music-it's more inclusive than that." Adds Meyer: "We're not fucking Rage Against the Machine or anything."
Propaganda: The interim between At The Sleepless Dawn and Every Red Heart... saw Red Sparowes undertake various tours both foreign and domestic (including a US haul with Pelican, Big Business and Breather Resist), as well as the release of split LPs with Gregor Samsa and Grails (both on Robotic Empire) and, most recently, the Triad three-way split seven-inch/CD with labelmates Battle Of Mice and Made Out Of Babies. Denouement (The Proletariat): ...And so our labours bear fruit, divorced though they might be from the strictures of orthodoxy, and bereft of the voice that is used to spread untruths and subvert the will of the people. Songs tumble from the sky like supreme directives, instilled with the conviction of supernal instinct and navigated by the lodestar of imagination. Warmed by the heat of electric current, they find their receptors in the heart and mind of the collective subconscious, delivering a reminder of that which is both human and divine...
