10 seconds of Red Light Company’s debut single With Lights Out are enough to tell you that the London band are in thrall to the blackened, glowering end of ‘80s rock. The portentous bass-line is pure Disintegration-era Cure, while the clanking drums even echo the toxic gloom of The Sisters Of Mercy’s This Corrosion.
If the music nods to the past, though, the vocals place the band in more modern company, since frontman Richard Rennaux sings in that high, strangulated-yearning manner – kind of an epic squawk, if such a thing is possible - that is the default setting for so much modern US alt-rock, from Arcade Fire to Modest Mouse to Black Kids.
In common with those bands, Rennaux’s lyrics are non-specific to the point of obscurity, although With Lights Out is apparently about the singer’s childhood experience of bereavement. “I had a friend who committed suicide,” he explains. “He folded his clothes up neatly by the side of a lake, overdosed on sleeping pills, then just walked in.”
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10 seconds of Red Light Company’s debut single With Lights Out are enough to tell you that the London band are in thrall to the blackened, glowering end of ‘80s rock. The portentous bass-line is pure Disintegration-era Cure, while the clanking drums even echo the toxic gloom of The Sisters Of Mercy’s This Corrosion.
