Red Sparowes

Knitting Factory - October 11, 2006

Live Review by Alexis Roberts

The Knitting Factory was fairly packed on the night of the Planes Mistaken for Stars, These Arms are Snakes and Red Sparowes show, especially considering that it was a Wednesday night.  But seeing as how the show was sponsored by Filter and was sort of a going away show for the Sparowes (who were off to Europe for a tour), it made sense that it sold out.

Planes Mistaken opened the show, followed by These Arms are Snakes, whose set dragged on forever. Seriously, it felt like they would just not stop playing. The distortion that their singer puts on his voice is so nasty that I wanted break a window with my face every time they started a new song. Finally they ended their set and I was a bit surprised to see the crowd thin out a bit seeing as how These Arms are Snakes was not the headlining band. It actually kind of pissed me off. Didn't these kids know what they were about to miss?

During The Red Sparowes set, flash photography was not allowed. I assume this is because they project a film onto the stage and the flash of a camera would interfere with the viewing of the film.  But, of course, some ass in the front row started flashing all over the place about three minutes into the first song—and was promptly removed.

The Red Sparowes played their entire new CD, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun, in chronological order. The video projected follows the storyline of the CD, depicting Chinese townspeople of the late 1950s, the land, the sparrows and locusts.  The story takes a bitter turn with flashes of emaciated Chinese children dying of starvation.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of Every Red Heart, it is a take onthe rule of Mao Tse-tung and how he told Chinese citizens to kill off the sparrows because they were destroying the crops. Because of the death of the sparrows—the natural predator of the locust—the locusts had a chance to wreak havoc on the crops, causing a vicious famine that wiped out about 40,000 Chinese people over the course of about four years.

I understood the video, and why they played their CD straight through in order, but I have a feeling that someone who didn't know the concept of the album might have been a little bit confused. They would know that the Sparowes were trying to do more than just show a creepy video, but I'm not sure that an outsider (so to speak) would really catch the concept just through a live performance. I do think that it would strike enough interest for them to want to figure it out, though.

We got no encore, and that didn't shock me. The crowd kept trying to cheer them back out stage but it didn't happen. What would they play anyway? Maybe the Chinese national anthem or something. Anyway, as I was leaving, I was thinking to myself how the crowd had been way cooler than the average crowd at any given show, but my thought was interrupted by that one guy—yes, you know which one I'm talking about—who yelled, "RED SPAROWES FUCKING ROCK MAAAAANNNNN !" right into my ear. I ate my words right then and there.