Artist: Life of Agony
Label: Roadrunner Records
Release Date: 1993
Rating: 5 Skulls
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Title: River Runs Red Artist: Life of Agony Label: Roadrunner Records Release Date: 1993
Rating: 5 Skulls |
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Reviewed by Redwolff (1/23/03):
I first heard this album when I was living in Boston and working in a chocolate store. After closing, the manager and I would take turns cranking CD's we'd brought in to ease the boring cleaning up/counting out procedures, stuff like Pantera, Helmet, Orange 9mm and Clutch's first album. One night he put River Runs Red in, and I was blown away. For the next few nights, that's the only thing we played. It must have been 1995, right before Ugly came out, because shortly thereafter LOA came to Boston, and a bunch of us went to see them, including Musashi - who metalled on despite being ill with a gastrointestinal thing - I'm sure no one was ever meant to get to know the toilets at Axis quite that well. The stage banter consisted mainly of the word "fuck" used in every possible grammatical position ("Boston! What the fuck? How the fuck are you? We're fucking glad to be here!" etc.). It was quite a night.River Runs Red traces the path of a high school senior living with his alcoholic father and strident, bitchy stepmother. We learn from his answering machine messages that his girlfriend is breaking up with him, he's failing two subjects and therefore not graduating, and that he's been fired from his job. Finally the wheels come off, and after entering the house to find his father and stepmother in a physical fight he locks himself in the bathroom and commits suicide. The last sounds of the album are the shrill screams of his fishwife stepmom fading away as his veins empty into the bathwater.
Happy stuff! I think it would have been difficult for any other band to pull this album off without it being incredibly cheesy and unbelievable. Only a few bands still attempted the "story within the album" thing, at least in such a blatant manner (see Operation: Mindcrime for an example), but LOA really approached this well. The answering machine messages, which tell a lot of the story, sound very realistic. The street sounds we hear as the kid is entering his house let you imagine he is living off some ugly, treeless highway in a dreary city. The crying baby and television add to the general bedlam of the interior of the house, and whoever played the stepmom did it brilliantly; her voice is so painful to hear. On top of that are Keith Caputo's howling, emotional, soul-wrenching vocals. At times it sounds like he'd rather get the feeling across than stay on key, as he slides up and down on closing notes. The pain, anger and frustration of the "main character" of the album comes across so clearly, I think if I had heard this album when I was an angsty highschooler... well, I don't know what, but I think I would have reacted to it even more strongly. The vocals just reach into you and rip your heart out.
I pulled this out to listen to in preparation for my review, after not hearing it for a couple years, and am not surprised to find I still know all the words. This is an album that stays with you.
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