After a live recording and a clutch of varied, ambitious standalone tracks, UK post-rockers Red Mar unfurl their long-percolating debut. It’s a dense and often dazzling piece of work – but also one that sometimes risks losing a firm sense of self amid its many fragmented personalities.
Kicking things off with the seventeen-minute ‘Namokel’ is a bold, borderline arrogant move, but it effectively sets out Red Mar’s stall and their state of mind. Things start quietly enough. Acoustic arpeggios and mumblefuck vocals are threaded with drones and scritchy background noise, but it’s not long before things morph into some sort of mangled Spanish guitar part and increasingly frenzied whorls of noise. From here on out the gloves are off, the band swaying between everything from straightahead indie rock strum to improv freefall and moments akin to the baroque gloom of The Black Heart Procession.
‘Verdant’, meanwhile, starts in a spiky, bouncy, puppyish sort of way. There are clacky, febrile guitars and bowlegged lurches, things pushing and pulling between the mathy, late-90s sounds of Washington DC and Chicago before hitting a weirder, more enjoyable note as they become waterlogged and soggy, assuming an awkward, globular, Skin Graft-esque demeanour.
Closing things out in typically ostentatious fashion is the two-part ‘Solenopsis’. Referencing the likes of Talk Talk, Slint and Don Caballero, the band tinker at the edges of post-rock’s time-honoured quiet-quiet-loud dynamic. Amid the delicate twinkles and seismic skronk-outs float vocals that are enjoyably atypical, pitched – rather bizarrely – somewhere between David Tibet, Aidan Moffat and Buñuel’s Eugene Robinson.
There’s no denying that Our Low Cell is impressive, and the effortlessness with which Red Mar navigate the many elements making up their sound speaks to both natural talent and a sense of hammer-and-tong perfectionism. This said, though, there’s also something slightly offputting at play. Everything is a bit po-faced, presented with a knowing flourish in the manner of a recent graduate keen to prove precisely how clever they are. There’s also the lingering question as to what might actually be left if you were to unpick the careful stitches binding the various sounds, styles and influences together. By their own admission, though, the album is a time capsule of sorts: a what they were then rather than what they are now. In this there’s a definite sense of promise – that having a few more miles on the clock might have allowed them to lock into something truly individual, while tempering their cram-it-all-in tendencies with a more measured sense of restraint.
