Red Leather

Reviewed by TenTillDeath:

Red Leather is a masked musician that’s known for incorporating old timey western movie tones with pop, indie, rock, and country. In the middle of one of their most interesting marketing stunts involving a character called “Black Leather,” Red Leather released their third studio album, Tahoe.

Tahoe opens up with a song called the Hardest Climb; a song featuring old western elements and narration that fully supports this theme. The narration is quite cringe inducing due to the nature of its song writing; however, the concept of opening up with an old western atmosphere is very intriguing. This western theme that starts off the album is hardly featured on this album and is really only seen on this album during “Lake of the Sky;” a song that feels more like an unlabeled intermission for the album. This may make listeners feel cheated as they’re expecting a folk rock, western rock, country rock style album, but instead are met with a album that’s a party mix of varying genres. And this is just the beginning of the album.

This album’s content covers Red Leather’s addictions and sobriety, and that’s something that Red Leather marketed in build up of the album. This content gets very repetitive as it seems as if every other song is about Red Leather’s addiction and sobriety. This leaves listeners wondering if this is all that Red Leather can talk about. If you can get through these flaws, then you got yourself a pretty solid album.

Red Leather’s strong suit on this album is his ability to write catchy choruses. Even if his verse song writing is basic, songs like Ms Whiskey and the chorus of The Man Behind The Mask will get you immediately hooked with its chorus. Even the opening track has a catchy hook after the narration ends. Hearing Red Leather sing “tahooooooooeeeee,” gets listeners singing along like a pack of wolves howling at the moon. 

Another great element to this album is Red’s play on words with the song “Ms Whiskey.” Red compares a person of interest to the alcohol beverage Whiskey, while also referring to her as Ms.Whiskey. In this same song , he talks about missing whiskey; a play on words and reference to his alcohol addiction.

I’d also like to add the fact that Red Leather has this growl to their singing voice which accompanies the idea of Red Leather, a cowboy looking character, vocally singing like a Cowboy with a rough voice. This growl to their voice makes their songs feels more human and personal as it highlights the biggest thing that makes us humans-human…our imperfections.  This growl demonstrates that someone with a imperfect voice like Red’s can use it to still convey basic human emotion; a feeling we can all connect on.

Tahoe is an album full of catchy choruses behind a rough voice that makes their songs feel human at every turn. Though this Red Leather fellow struggled to stick to a genre theme on Tahoe; their play on words in Ms Whiskey, their catchy sing a long songs, and their music makes up for it. Our final rating for this album is a 3.5 out of 5.

Watch our full video review on this album below