The Red Krayola (album)

The Red Krayola
Studio album by The Red Krayola
Released	September 19, 1994
Recorded	1994
Studio
Label	Drag City
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Track listing

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Jimmy Silk/Supper Be Ready Medley"	1:57
2.	"Pride"	1:06
3.	"Book of Kings"	2:40
4.	"Pessimisty"	2:50
5.	"Worms, Worms, Thirst"	1:38
6.	"People Get Ready (The Train's Not Coming)"	3:22
7.	"If 'S' Is"	2:06
8.	"Miss X"	2:37
9.	"Rapspierre"	2:44
10.	"Stand-Up"	2:42
11.	"Art-Dog"	1:09
12.	"I Knew It"	1:54
13.	"101st"	1:54
14.	"(Why) I'm So Blasé"	2:07
15.	"The Big Macumba"	2:42
16.	"Voodoo Child"	1:47
17.	"Suddenly"	1:51

Personnel

Musicians

David Grubbs (guitar), John McEntire (drums), Albert Oehlen (electronics), Jim O'Rourke (Moog), Stephen Prina, Mayo Thompson (writing, vocals, guitar), Tom Watson (guitar)

Cover art

The cover photo was taken by Albert Oehlen. It appears to depict the Volksparkstadion stadium in Hamburg, Germany. The visible advertisements are for "Nova Versicherungen," an insurance company, and "Tom T" — maybe Tom Tailor, a clothing brand based in Hamburg and a major sponsor of the Hamburger SV team until 2003.

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2015

After [the 1993 concert in] Graz I got the bug again and started to play the guitar more, wrote five or six tunes and recorded them four-track with an eye to hitting up a record company for a deal and along came a chance. [...] One day David Grubbs rang. He asked what I was up to and I gave him a dub of the four-track stuff, telling him of my plan to go to the bank. He asked if he might send it to Drag City in Chicago, urging me to hold off getting back in the mainstream grinder. It turned out Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn liked the stuff. During Christmas ’93, when I was home in Texas visiting my mother, Dan rang. He was able to persuade me to give Drag City a chance. I swallowed my qualms about working again indie style. Eventually, Albert [Oehlen] and I went to Chicago and did our first work with the label, a song called “Columbia,” maybe another. Ultimately we made the eponymous LP at Steve Albini’s studio, building the set around the tunes from Germany, David playing, along with John McEntire from Bastro, Tom Watson from Slovenly, and Stephen Prina—an artist I’d gotten to know at the Pasadena art center. I won’t name everybody. The names are on the cover. Sure enough things kind of clicked and we got gigs. I should say too that I met Jim O'Rourke then, but didn’t know at first what to do with him. I’m glad to say we were able finally to get him involved.

Reviews

Aiding & Abetting

August 31, 1994

If you remember the Mayo Thompson re-issue from earlier in the summer, you should be prepared.

Having been around for over 25 years, The Red Krayola is the main vehicle of Thompson's muse. He gets a few friends together and they play some very odd music. In years past it might have been called "psychedelic pop", I suppose, but that term has mutated over the years, and I don't think that's quite right now.

I think I like "eclectic pop" better. The Red Krayola folks turn traditional rhythms ad melodies on their heads, exposing them as the true opiates of the masses. It can be difficult listening to an album with so many discordant statements, but as you know, I like that sort of thing.

Anything that makes me think this much is certainly fine. And if this music doesn't haunt your mind like a pissed off secret, then you didn't listen hard enough the first time. Like it says, "Play Extremely Loud."

Chicago Reader

January 19, 1995

Bill Meyer

[...] The Red Krayola’s sound has varied widely over the years, but Thompson’s distinctive voice and guitar playing have always been immediately identifiable. His voice is high, quavery, and resolutely off key, but it is nevertheless a remarkable instrument. He is a master of phrasing, nimbly negotiating tricky rhythms and irregular song structures with ease. His vocal delivery suits his lyrics; on the new album’s “Rapspierre,” a dense Marxist social critique, he is by turns professorial, chiding, and sorrowful. The perpetual catch in his throat emphasizes the song’s outrage and regret. Thompson’s guitar playing is precise, clipped, and acerbic; he’s prone to off-kilter melodic runs that take the songs on unexpected tangents. The Red Krayola is the most guitar-heavy record Thompson’s ever recorded. He and Grubbs, joined by guitarists Tom Watson and Stephen Prina, pack terse, interlocking riffs around McEntire’s nimble drumming on the album’s 17 brief tunes. There is no bassist–the thick tone would only get in the way of the other instruments. Jim O’Rourke and Albert Oehlen contribute squiggly synthesizer noises, buzzing around and commenting on the guitar parts rather than fulfilling the traditional keyboard role of filling up harmonic space. [...]

Brutarian

90s

So let me get this straight. A musician fails to realize that ever since he stopped taking LSD and smoking pot some twenty-five years ago he's become totally incapable of producing anything of even passing interest. And because people can't believe it and, furthermore, are too embarrassed to tell him he's a loser, they instead take to calling the bum a legend? What for? So he won't kill himself? I say, "Give this man a gun." A big gun. Still, it's hard to believe this rancid collection of moronic dada rock and meandering, inconsequential AOR nonsense was penned by the guy who wrote the amazing "Hurricane Fighter Plane" and put it on the even more amazing Parable of Arable Land lp. Maybe not. Especially if you've heard the execrable stuff he did with Art & Language.

The Trouser Press guide to '90s rock

1997

Recorded by a collective of seven (including guitarists David Grubbs, Jim O'Rourke and Tom Watson, drummer John McEntire and German synthesist Albert Oehlen), The Red Krayola is a potent modern exposition of Thompson's Beefheart-ian musical inventions and wickedly offbeat lyrics. For all its idiosyncratic juxtapositions, the album is a relatively straightforward electric affair — alternatively engaging and patience testing — that sends antagonistic elements (noisy guitar, catatonic electronic blips, contrary rhythms) out to disrupt the calmly logical organization of restrained, tuneful inventions like the waltz-time "Jimmy Silk/Supper By Ready Medley," "Pride," "Book of Kings," (which paraphrases Carly Simon and quotes children's verse), the courtly, Roxy Music-like "Miss X," the chromatic "Art-Dog" and "Suddenly," crooned as a sweet harmony vocal exercise. Traditionally cavalier in his appreciation of song structures, Thompson fleshes out the album with "Rapspierre" (another of his accelerated Marxist theory courses, this one containing sing-song doggrel about monkeys, random keyboard noises and turntable scratches), the ripping drive-gear "People Get Ready (The Train's Not Coming)" near-instrumental and the catchy mantra "I Knew It." Provocative and, for the most part, highly entertaining.