Red Mar – Our Low Cell

Our Low Cell by Red Mar

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.

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