Redd Kross

Steven. “He’s a super-talented musician who’s really good at being supportive, and he’s really in-tune with a band’s internal dynamics. And he had us on our best behaviour, not wanting to disappoint Josh! His studio is like the most incredible vintage guitar shop – he would take great delight in pulling out some rare instrument or effects box to inspire us.”
In Klinghoffer’s company, the brothers tore through their new batch of songs. And what songs… “I’m usually the one who says our albums have to be ‘ten songs, no more’,” nods Jeff. “But we had all these great songs, and we wanted to let them all breathe. So the album had to be 18 songs.” But if the prospect of these unabashed Beatles-heads delivering an eponymous double-album with a sleeve of a single colour has you expecting a meandering, eclectic set like the Fabs’ ‘White Album’, Redd Kross is all-killer, no-filler, more akin to their Exile On Main Street, their Double Nickels On The Dime, their Zen Arcade: 58 minutes of solid-gold power-pop, driven by melody and dynamic, with a lyric- sheet that’ll reward all your perusing.
‘Candy Colored Catastrophe’ opens proceedings with the perfect vibe: an itchy, unforgettable acid- pop nugget taking impish swings at what Steven describes as “the fine arts career of a well-known pop star who we love-love-love, and also love to make fun of”. “Our message is, ‘What is art?’,” adds Jeff. “Who gets to decide? And maybe these rock-stars who suddenly decide they’re fine artists and Hollywood actors who decide they’re punk-rock singers should, you know, stay in their lane.” From there, this revivified Redd Kross tear into the heaviest rock banger of the set, ‘Stunt Queen’, which Jeff says is “the closest we come to a ‘political song’. It’s about these total fame-whores in politics who’ll do anything to be on TV – people like Lindsay Graham, who doesn’t care how humiliated he gets, as long as he’s on TV. It’s like some weird kink.” Then there’s the “unbearable man” in ‘Terrible Band’, inspired by Jeff and Josh’s obsession with documentaries about cults, and the number of musicians they know who behave like cult-leaders. There’s ‘The Witches Stand’, a downbeat psychedelic power-ballad stringing together a narrative involving Brian Jones, and Jean Harlow, and DeeDee Detroit of early LA punks UXA, “who disappeared off the face of the earth, though I see her at the grocery sometimes,” grins Jeff. “Fame – and surviving it – is the joining thread of that song.”
The album boasts some absolutely killer couplets, like ‘Cancion Enojada’’s snarling “I revoke your pass / You’re such an ass”, or “She dumped the leader of Kiss / Because he was not fine”, from ‘Emmanuel Insane’, inspired in equal parts by the Rolling Thunder Tour documentary on Netflix, David Bowie’s glam-era and the later Emanuelle sequels. Prime Redd Kross, in other words. But there are deeper themes here, too – the cosmic ‘The Main Attraction’ derives its power from the brothers’ dual vocals and Beatles-y harmonies, and its tracing the motivation for the ever-expanding universe’s kinks and twists to love. And sometimes they just boil everything down to a perfect pop song, as in ‘I’ll Take Your Word For It’, a perfect blast of 60s-shaded harmony and guitar tangle. But perhaps the finest song on Redd Kross is the song that closes Redd Kross – that is, in no small part, the ballad of Redd Kross, or at least their early days. ‘Born Innocent’ retells the early days of the group, the first thrill of punk-rock, their nascent explorations of that wide-world they’d later become synonymous with. “It’s like the Cliff Notes version of our formation,” laughs Jeff. “It was the first song we wrote for the album, and actually we wrote it for the documentary, Born Innocent.”
“We’d been doing the interviews for the movie, and for our memoir,” adds Steven. “We were in a reflective mood, perhaps.” But Redd Kross is not the sound of legends resting on their laurels – rather, it’s Redd Kross spreading their wings and grasping their true potential, after 45 years in the game. The best record in the Redd Kross discography – or should we say, their best record, until the next one. “We’re on a schedule,” nods Steven. “It’s our 45th anniversary, but we’re still defining who we are. We put our noses to the grindstone for this album, and we did it! And it feels like the beginning of something. It’s so exciting to us that there’s still more to discover. We’re publishing the memoir, the movie’s coming out, we’re releasing this new album – and getting the machine started up again makes me nervous, and that’s thrilling. Our third act is going to be badass.”