Gowns - Red State LP

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'Red State' is the band's debut full-length album, recorded at home in bedrooms and basements from rural South Dakota to Los Angeles. It is an intense, sometimes eerie, always affecting listen, some of the tracks drift like fog, others are driven forward by Corey's kinetic percussive glory.

Opener 'Fargo' immediately sets the scene, it's lush shimmering whisper and Erika's accelerating vocal rush head first into the crushed ballad 'Rope', with its scrambled electronics and blurred conversations of clipped noise and Ezra's claustrophobic delivery. 'Red State' is an ambitious record trying to capture a hidden truth that we all stare through each day.

'White Like Heaven' is the pivotal moment of the album. Its story driven epiphany lays reality bare amongst the quiet murmur of disconnecting inputs and fevered drones, which submit to all-consuming crescendos of spectral sound, before the drums flail into the foreground, exploding in joyous abandon.

"Was it white like heaven or dark like space? Was it bright like God or ace black spades?"

The same song provides a vision of America that is felt across the whole album. A profound dislocation and alienation from the routine of the everyday drives the distant narrator to inspect small town America from behind the curtains.

"I saw the man outside walking his dog mowing his lawn and the kids out in the yard, and I knew right then that she was gonna have another baby let it grow up in front of the TV eat macaroni and cheese".

These differing lyrical approaches – the inward looking, the social commentator – are also reflected by contrasting use of sounds and song structure throughout the record, felt most strongly in the album's two extremes. The brutal heights, punishing drums and digital hell of 'Mercy' are drawn in sharp contrast with 'Clawless', a tender a capella number from Erika whose hushed words express vulnerability whilst an undercurrent of anxiety leaks into the song.