[show_avatar email=julie@iwenttoashow.com align=left avatar_size=62] The Red River drove from Long Beach, California to Benton Park neighborhood in St. Louis to give a show in front of 15 or so of us at the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center last night. There are seven or eight guys in the band: lead vocals and guitar (Bill), French horn (Sumner), and the guy who sold me a CD (Danny) were among them. There’s also a saxophone player, a tromboner, a drummer, a couple of keyboard players, and a guy who plays the bass. The CD I bought, an advance copy of Little Songs for the Bigger Picture, doesn’t have credits in it, so I can’t tell you much more than that. It does have a poster folded four times, one half, a good graphic-novel style drawing (unsigned) of a kitchen window, the faucet and dish drainer in the shadows, and the other half filled with the handwritten lyrics to their nine songs, words crossed out and re-written here and there, each printed in a prose-poem format that pleases me.

I spent a few hours yesterday listening to all the tracks on their Myspace (they don’t have a Facebook page, so you can’t like them yet). The first track, “When We Are Wild,” has a spare, Xiu Xiu-style toy Casio backbeat that of course, I fell for. And once they added in the chamber pop horn section and some sweet xylophone action, I was sold.

I’d never been to the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center, and their sign is handpainted and not visible from the street so I drove past it three times before I finally put down the window and listened for the music. You can’t go in until the band stops performing and Fragile Farm was still in the middle of their set, so I sat on the curb and talked to my dad on the phone. When they paused, I was allowed entry, and I hung back for the rest of their songs, surveying the place. The back corner sofa was stuffed with boys, like six of them wedged in together, which was funny since there were a few empty sofas here and there. There was a stack of dirty dishes on the merch table. There were two lamps with poems painted on them. A shelf full of instrument cases lined up neatly against the blacked-out windows.

When Fragile Farm came off stage, I noticed the boy-pile was the next band. I sat in the front sofa while The Red River set up and soundchecked. I recognized the lead singer, Bill, from a video I saw on someone’s blog. He was wearing a blue thrift-store sweatshirt with CALCULUS printed on it and the sleeves pushed up, and khaki shorts and sneakers with socks. He turned to me while he was working and asked if I thought he needed more guitar and less keys in his amp. The fourth wall was broken, and I stammered a semi-intelligent response, but as soon as his back was turned, I hopped back to a second-row sofa for safety. I went by instinct, but in time I realized I was right. You don’t want to get too close to this band. It is radioactive with goodness. It will get all over you and the evil things you’ll have to do to get that goodness off of you? Unspeakable.

And they knew it too, either that we weren’t quite worthy of their goodness, or that we needed protection from it, because one song in, Bill asked us if we minded if they had all the lights turned off. We gave them permission to play in the dark and they did, with only the faint light from the be-poemed table lamps in the back that Bill said he liked a lot.

Since there weren’t any credits on the CD, I don’t know who writes their songs. I assume it’s Bill, since he writes their blog and the voice sounds the same. I have a lot of experience with the sincere, the spare, simple burning words of one who drops all pretense of artifice and interest in cool. There’s no worldliness in the songs of The Red River, only a sweet-faced puppyish passion for life and for people. The open-hearted face-licking this album Little Songs for the Big Picture gives you will leave you breathless. As far as genre, I guess I can go with Bill’s claim that they’re “techno-pop,” but it’s their pared-down slow jams that really grab you.

Bill made another request of the audience, that the band go unplugged for one song. We consented. He hopped off stage (the area rug at the front of the room), and jumped behind the piano in the back. He said he’d never played this song live, and hadn’t practiced it, and even though he knew it was probably a mistake, he dove in anyway. He played the piano and sang, no microphone. The song was gorgeous and tank-filling, and it had a crying kitten in it.

At the end of the show, they thanked us all profusely, thanked The Lemp for making them dinner, and accepted an offer from an audience member for a place to stay the night.

I don’t know if the low number of toe-holds for online creeping The Red River offers is to protect them from us, to allow their thing do itself and to soften the worry about the ad-hominem heckling that seems to plague artists whose lives are more internet accessible. Now that they’ve made the NPR Music Fall Preview List with “When We Are Wild,” alongside new songs from Sufjan Stevens, Belle & Sebastian, Deerhunter and the like, they’ll be getting plenty of attention from nosy folks like me.

The part of me that likes to immerse itself in the creative processes of others is disappointed by mystery. The part of me that is cynical and adult chafes at the thought that I might accidentally really like a Christian band. But dammit, they’re good musicians, they write solid lyrics, and they worked Del Taco into a song. Let them be a mystery. And I look forward to seeing online reviews when Little Songs for the Big Picture is officially released on November 2nd, and how all the content will have to be uniquely composed instead of cut and pasted from Wikipedia, interviews on music blogs, or slick artist pages on last.fm and Facebook.

Sometimes you just have to let yourself like something you can’t research to death. If you weren’t such a skeptic, such an internet creeper, you might not even know that BRAVE Records is The Red River’s label, or that BRAVE is an acronym for Bountiful, Righteous, And Very Exciting. If you could just shut off the questions and like something for being beautiful, maybe even the most beautiful thing you ever heard, maybe you’d be a happier person for it. And if I ask myself honestly, How many things are *you* on an absolutely consistent basis? The only sincere answer I can muster is: Full of words and full of doubt.

Perhaps I’ll see you at church on Sunday.
But I doubt it.

Morning Routine
In the morning, in the apartment I can hear the
sound of someone mowing and a dog barking. In the
cupboard there’s cups and coffee. I’m in the kitchen
you’re in the shower and I can hear you humming.
The kitten cries, my heart is shining and it’s the
little things I’m going to miss when I can’t find them.
Oh last night the drinks and dancing and outside
the palms are dying they drop their branches. I
know I’m blessed and I can’t help but sing your
song while I get dressed.