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"Sundown" is a great start to the album, with a driving beat, melancholy, dreamy sounds and tons of mood. The song oozes imagery and poetry which, as you'd guess, is a good thing. "The Web" is a bit darker and slower, with some piano and trumpet sounds that help to give it a crawling, menacing and organic sound. It's a well-crafted pop song as well, with a beautiful chorus and evocative sounds. In fact, it reminds me a lot of an early Vangelis song with lyrics and piano. The web of the title actually doesn't seem to refer to the WWW that you'd think it does, but rather to the twisted nature of relationships. "Hollow" is another slow and dark song; perhaps even darker than the previous song. The dark of these songs is a very mature dark from earlier works, though. The themes are more personal and real, and the organic sounds of the synthwork is a great sound. "Love Lacks Gravity" is a bit of a faster song, with delicate piano work in the middle, and some odd jazzy sounds in the beginning. "Cliche" is a better song; one of the better on the CD actually, with a slighter brighter sound; an almost romantic tone and a step away from the dark, minor tones of previous works. Nevertheless, as I said, the song is one of my favorites on the CD -- mellow, mid-tempo and absolutely beautiful, with a delicate fragility that you certainly wouldn't have expected from Red Flag ten years earlier. Speaking of delicate fragility, what Red Flag cd would be complete without a tinkling piano instrumental, with some synthsounds and sweeping orchestral backgrounds, right? Here we have "Digital Sunrise" filling that role, and doing so remarkably well. My favorite song here, though, not surprisingly is a dance song, "Nevermind http". While it has some of the darkness of a traditional Red Flag song, it's a far cry from Naive Art in many ways, with clever lyrics, the now familiar new organic sound, excellent vocals yet with some obvious ties in the synthwork to older Red Flag riffs. "Alive" slows it down considerably, a condition that more or less prevails for the rest of the CD. Despite it's similarity in title to movies about cannibalistic soccor players, this is a very moving song with tinkling synths and a dark melody. "Collide" is also slow and starts out a bit more menacing rather than personally despairing. Again, it's a very well-done song, full of meaning and emotion, with dreamy, dark vocals and warm yet dark synthwork. "Minuet in E Minor" sets out to prove that a Red Flag CD can't have too many percussion-less piano solos, and this is another, delicate and dreamy, dark and artistic work. "Layin Low" is a strange, "dub" version of "Sundown" without much in the way of vocals, but with more in the way of weird synthwork and stuff like that. About what you'd expect from an "instrumental" dub version, really, although a few lines of lyrics from the regular version of the song do appear here and there. Likewise, "Anti-gravity" is another version of "Love Lacks Gravity".
Overall, this is a pretty decent piece of work from Red Flag. The tone and mood are very different from their previous work; darker in many ways, although also very subdued and subtle. The vocals, lyrics and sounds are several steps ahead of earlier Red Flag work, and it has also settled into a bit of a compromise between the derivative work of Naive Art and the odd niche-sound of The Lighthouse. This album alone made me glad I came back to Red Flag a full ten years after their initial release.
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