From the intimidatingly prolific home studio of Glenn Donaldson comes Uncommon Weather, the latest album under this The Reds, Pinks and Purples moniker. It’s the second record from RP&Ps in just over six months, and it may very well not be the last this year… That’s for another day, but for now, these 13 tracks provide the perfect view from Donaldson’s San Francisco window, surveying the politics of place and its people, and exploring the intersection of fandom and creavitity through the lens of near-classicist indiepop.
How The Reds, Pinks and Purples arrived here is a story with many roots, the most consequential of which is perhaps the musical aftermath of his earlier band, The Art Museums, whose brief tenure in the late ’00s coincided with an explosive period of the Bay Area rock scene and was followed by a hermetic musical period of Donaldson’s. Disenchanted with the dissolution of his band, Donaldson averted the DIY-pop sound with an instrumental, conceptual project called FWY! but meanwhile started a habitual songwriting practice, sharing nascent songs with friends in an email exchange. In 2013–2014, The Reds, Pinks and Purples took shape as the moniker for Glenn’s most direct expressions in the DIY-pop mode, enabled by this new disciplined output. By then, San Francisco was already a changed place. The tragic loss of his former bandmate in Art Museums was another source of discontinuity and rupture. You can hear in The Reds, Pinks and Purples’ earliest songs this grappling with life, anxiety, and atrophying subcultures. For an artist with an overriding interest in the aesthetic principles of discrete musical genres, this turn toward his immediate world for subject matter was a major shift, setting The Reds, Pinks and Purples apart from Donaldson’s other musical ventures.
Self-recorded and mostly self-performed, Uncommon Weather features pinnacle versions of songs Donaldson has honed since the beginning of the project. The album arrives with grateful timing, quick on the heels of You Might Be Happy Someday (which is back in print here), and alleviating, for a brief window at least, whatever it is that keeps us coming back to this elemental music. Donaldson imagines his listeners are just like himself: fascinated and addicted to the spiritual power of uncomplicated pop classics.
The album is available on DL, CD & LP, and once again sees artwork provided by both Donaldson and Matthew Walkerdine. Are friends over at Slumberland are handling release duties in the US.
Buy/stream Uncommon Weather HERE
A blue vinyl repress of You Might Be Happy Someday is available HERE
