The Reds Pinks And Purples - Acknowledge Kindness: Album Review

Artwork for the reds pinks and purples album acknowledge kindness

4 stars hq

If you like your beauty corroded and ungently aged with The Reds Pinks And Purples’ new album you’re very much in the right place.

You might know Glenn Donaldson by another name.

Throughout a prolific career he’s operated under more than thirty aliases including Skygreen Leopards, Art Museums and The Ivy Tree, but it’s been The Reds Pinks And Purples which has offered a semblance of home.

Self-produced and recorded over a period of eight months, Acknowledge Kindness is his tenth album in this guise.

A resident of San Francisco, the singer has drawn for inspiration on mundane factors like the urban solemnity of his neighbourhood but also the darkness of society’s current meta.

As a result it’s arguably – and consciously – his most accomplished work to date.

By definition it’s also a more widescreen affair. Donaldson openly admits his fixation with late eighties’ college rock blossoms on it:

‘There’s a certain kind of big sounding record I aspire to make, like California by American Music Club or 16-Lover’s Lane by The Go-Betweens, works that steer into the pain but become a transportational device for the listener.’

Now widely acknowledged as classics, both of those contemporaneously, in spite of their gait, were listened to mostly in forlorn people’s bedrooms.

A tenuous bead of acknowledgement even explores this on the furiously catchy Emo Band, a threading of intra- generational miserabilists that also nods to the singer’s adolescent roots spent in thrall to hardcore punk.

Opener ‘Is it you, or is it them?’ sets this scene eloquently, beginning with, ‘No sunshine/Darkness again/With the rest of the world/crashing down on you’, then setting this against a gorgeous melancholia that eventually decays into white noise and mind fuzz.

If you like your beauty corroded and ungently aged you’re very much in the right place.

If the words often have a framing which reads like they were lifted from old journals then the presence of two instrumentals equally points to an artist eager to sketch.

On the reverb drenched Blue Heron Lake a simple guitar phrase recurs as the dreamy flourishes bloom around it, whilst the titular closer is careworn and cinematic, a deep blue sunset looking hard for a desert skyline to melt into.

Guessing by the song titles, however, there are worldly preoccupations to deal with too.

The word ‘love’ features in three of them, with each taking a different perspective and all making a study of the idea rather than glorying in any kind of participation.

Heaven Of Love takes a wry, from a distance look, Donaldson’s unadorned voice the perfect foil to the insistent lo-fi jangle and the semi wall of sound dynamic.

Tenderness in these places is unexpected but, when found, welcome; the plaintive strings of Build Love cosset a song which has an intimacy that’s almost physical.

The finest moments though are not departures from mood as such but where the emotional pan is such that it’s irresistible.

On Doubt In Vain a luminescent piano seems unable to resurrect whatever is about to be sacrificed to broken promises, but whilst New Leaf begins celestially with, ‘You were a god/Under the bright moon’, its rusted Americana looking deep into the night sky with a thousand-yard, guttering romanticism.

You might know Glenn Donaldson by another name and, if you choose to play detective, each of those identities will have its respective tones and trials.

As The Reds Pinks And Purples he’s made peace with himself, recalling the golden age of being in a party of one whilst listening to anonymous bands from the other side of the world.

Acknowledge Kindness happily wears those scars – and is all the better for it.

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