Chevelle - The Red

As I’m sure you’ll all agree at home, as connoisseurs of both high taste and fidelity, that you’d only need to listen to about fifteen seconds of this week’s Rock Song of the Week pick to guess to within a year of when it came out. Some tracks are just like that – so steeped in the audio language of their time that it’s like a marker, a beacon that flashes a light that spells out “I had a wallet with a chain on it, yet nothing worth stealing in said wallet” in Morse code. 

Not that anything like that is automatically a bad thing; for Chevelle, it was about as good a thing that could have happened. Formed in what is comparatively a tiny village in Grayslake, Illinois, in 1995, you might look at the band name and logo that looks and sounds like it should be on the front of a car and wonder whether it’s music or exhaust fumes you’re getting. Turns out, it looks and sounds like that because it’s actually from the back of a car, so I suppose that’s a lesson to trust your instincts somewhat. The band have been riotously popular in alternative circles (squares?) from the release of their second album Wonder What’s Next, which did gangbusters in large part due to the very track you’re listening to. A heavy, emotional song with every alt-rock, post-grunge hallmark you can think of, yes. But it’s the feel of it that counts here; The Red is a song that you can listen to and not have to wonder whether it’s based on a personal experience, which elevates it above a lot of what came out at the time to a point of almost being a touchstone of that very limited period of musical history. There’s a reason you can identify it, but for a lot of people, there were a lot of reasons they could really identify with it. 

Saying that, while the song itself is great and a catch-all time capsule for the era of alternative music, I’d recommend watching the video for this one as well if you’ve never seen it. Mostly because of the track we’re pushing, obviously, but a little on account of it being strikingly bad and quite unintentionally funny. I won’t spoil the “story” too much, but when everyone starts cautiously tapping each other with fold-up chairs in what is supposed to be a representation of uncontrollable rage, while the band moodily does a terrible job of pretending to perform in every other shot, you are going to lose the very serious thread of the song quite quickly. Can’t have it all, I guess.