Red for Stop is a mysterious French-based indie collective with four core musicians, who have worked in various projects based in different counties, and collaborate with others. The collective has won the KR Home Studios Discoveries contest three years in a four year period.
Building upon a growing profile, Red For Stop released “God In You,” earlier this year. The song is a hook-driven bit of trip hop that to my ears reminded me a bit of a synthesis of Goldfrapp, Portishead, and Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles and balearic house with a jazz-inspired coda.
With their latest single “You Caused This,” the French outfit continue a run of trip-hop-inspired pop built around a gorgeous and achingly plaintive female vocal, expressing both yearning and bitter regret paired with twinkling keys, subtly swelling strings, power chord-driven guitar lines and a shout-along worthy chorus. Sonically speaking, the song is part-Tori Amos, part Portishead, part power pop anthem.
“First we create music and sounds without any vocals,” the French outfit says of their creative process. “Then we go on the internet, looking for vocals, which could suit to the music. We never find perfect ones. So sometimes we have to modify certain notes of the vocal to make them working [sic] with the harmony of the music. This works takes a long time.
“When we have finished, the result is very different of [sic] the original song from which we use the vocals. So we say that this is not a remix but an Unmix or an UndoMix. We do not know if other musicians do the same. Anyway, we try to respect the feeling of the original song an create a real musical alternative of it, with a lot of modesty and respect.
“‘You Caused This,’ is an example of this,” they explain. The original song “Youth” was written by an English band called Daughter.
