Horrid Red is an offshoot of Teenage Panzerkorps, consisting of Bunker Wolf, Edmund Xavier, and Catholic Pat & Clay Ruby (Burial Hex). Horrid Red explore the dusty corners of dark post-punk music ...
Celestial Joy is a wholly enjoyable, barely poppy, and somewhat horrifying trip into a world of low fidelity, danceable darkness. It’s your entire dusty, goth/art-rock record collection cued onto a shitty boombox and told to all play at once, Zaireeka style–with a dude yelling atop it all in German.
Though some of the lo-fi sounds are harsher than they are sugary, there’s a lot more new wave goodness to be had than the pure post-punk or industrial obscurity they list to emulate. A lot of the record’s instrumentation shimmers and lulls, rather than stabs and batters. Sure, at times frontman Bunker Wolf attains a Mark E. Smith level snarl (albeit in Deutsch), which gives the record a nice, angry kick. But overall, it’s equal parts danceable 80s new wave, John Maus lo-res, Casiotone pop, and post-punk melded into a slow-burning new wave nightmare.
“Forever Is Too Long”, for instance, is an 8-bit, lo-fi, punked-out take on The Cure’s “Love Song”, fit with with humming organ synth and delicate acoustic guitars, only sharpened by the onset of drone-y bass synths and Wolf’s angry ranting. “Marble Staircase Part III” features languid, shimmering guitars juxtaposed with digital hi-hat and industrial trash can banging and metallic gun cocking, all shrouded in the record’s perpetual haze of lo-fi impenetrability.
