Warm Red—The Way Felt Feels/Big Tiger b/w S.A.M. (Self-Released/Chunklet Industries)
the way felt feels by warm red
“I just want to see something special/I just want to touch something real/I just want to feel like a magnet/in a room packed full of nails.”
Warm Red strikes an archtypical punk pose, bored enough to make trouble, disaffected enough that it hardly seems worth the effort. The singer has a snarling, atonal energy, deadpan come hithers leading abruptly to animal-like hisses and howls. The band behind him is a rackety tight one, slashing relentlessly at the same violent guitar chord, careening right up to the line and pulling up short to leave space for a shrugging “Yeah” and then right back to the brink for an equally blank-voiced “Man.”
Warm Red is a four-piece, with Tony Gary the singer, Jacob Armando on drums, Bryan Scherer on guitar and Stephen Lewis; it’s new enough not to have much of an internet trail, but the band already has one cassette/digital release to its name in The Way Felt Feels, self-released early this year, and a single on Chunklet Industries. The cassette is good messy, kinetic fun, with highlights in that “Yeah, Man,” song discussed one paragraph above, a fiery existential romp called “Animal,” and an enraged stomp all over fast-food survival jobs called “Manager,” all hammered and banged into submission by a tight and aggressive band. It’s in the single, though, that Warm Red really hits its stride. Cleaned up a bit, they sound fiercer than ever. This is not the kind of band that needs to hide behind fuzzy production.
Big Tiger b/w S.A.M. by Warm Red
Consider the A-side. “S.A.M.” erupts out of a jackhammer spate of guitar playing, all one note but blur speed, bass notes bounding in and around it, drums dry and relentless, just a cymbal crash every eight measures or so for color. The singer's voice is brash and magnetic, sexually charged but disdainful, as he confides, “I don’t want to break anything/I just want to touch everything….touch it with my dirty hands.” The band has an emphatic way of finishing a phrase, pulling back into a dead stop, then rampaging on as if nothing happened. There’s a crash and dissolution, a four-car pile-up of broken noise, and then a jaunty woodblock knock kicks them all back into their rickety groove.
“Big Tiger,” likewise, posits a boxy, post-punk groove, and lets loose a yowl and snarl and beckon within it. This is not a lyrics band, but part of the spiel has to do with animals and, specifically, their close resemblance to human beings (and vice versa). Here, they take the predators’ side in both the Wild Kingdom and human interaction, with the verse, “I find it hard to believe/that animals can be so trusting/trusting, trusting, that’s so fucking disgusting/I must be kidding myself, because nobody can be that trusting, trusting, trusting, is that the word?” It is hard to convey how full of contempt Warm Red can make the word “trusting” sound.
Warm Red reminds me most of Negative Scanner, a Chicago band that similarly combines unrelenting punk aggression with disdain. We would burn this place to the ground if it was worth it, the aesthetic says, but it’s not.
