BY STEVE
APPLEFORD, TOM
BEAUJOUR
It's been 40 years since SoCal brothers Jeff and Steven McDonald, then only 17 and 13, first released music as Redd Kross – okay, the band was actually called Red Cross initially – but, cease-and-desist orders aside, that's one hell of long time for a creative relationship to survive and thrive. From their scrappy beginnings as an amped up, pop-culture-obsessed punk unit to the muscular Kiss and Beatles informed power pop band that clinched them not one, but two major-label deals in the late '80s and '90s, to their most recent series of excellent albums for Merge Records, Redd Kross have brought superior songcraft to the rock 'n' roll table. When the McDonalds began their musical journey it would have been unthinkable for a band, at least one seeking to achieve professional results, to self-record, produce, and mix their own albums. But, as recording technology has evolved over the ensuing decades, both brothers (Steven more obsessively than Jeff, as you'll see) have embraced the freedom and ability to maintain the integrity of a creative vision that DIY record-making affords. The younger McDonald, who had already tasked himself with mixing Redd Kross' 2012 album, Researching the Blues, also recorded and engineered all of their latest release, Beyond the Door at his own studio, The Whiskey Kitchen. Propelled by the inimitable Dale Crover of the Melvins (see interview this issue) on drums, it's an album that sounds so full, so energetic, so totally tubular, that it led an occasional Tape Op contributor such as myself to think, "Fuck! Who recorded this?" That's the very question that lead me to pitch a story on Redd Kross to the magazine.
