Blood Moon is the new album from Nottinghamshire based rockers Red Bazar, their first since 2022’s Inverted Reality. Red Bazar explore an increasing range of musical styles on Blood Moon. They have often displayed a hard almost ‘prog-metal’ edge to some of their material, but this album is more expansive and diverse in ambition, and the harder edges are softened with decidedly melodic excursions. The lyrical themes tackle some difficult subjects with some of their usual subtle musings on political matters, but they also characteristically present some songs inspired by literature… and musings on the end of the world!
Red Bazar are often associated with Peter Jones of Camel and Tiger Moth Tales, and the Red Bazar musicians have comprised his Tiger Moth Tales band. This is his fourth album with them as their vocalist and keyboardist since his fine debut with them in 2016’s <em>Tales from the Bookcase. However, it would be inaccurate and somewhat unfair to the rest of Red Bazar to describe this as a Peter Jones project. In Red Bazar Peter Jones is definitely part of a band which contributes equally. Red Bazar had their roots in instrumental rock music with a hard edge. Pete Jones now writes their lyrics, but the music is very much a collaborative undertaking.
Blood Moon gets off to a powerful and dramatic start with the crunching rock bravado of Fall on Your Sword, which gives Pete Jones a great excuse to indulge in his almost screaming ‘ROCK voice’ in the chorus: ‘Dance a while, In the fire… Really feel the flames’.
The lyrics rage at the establishment and how the media divides and inflames us all:
Mystify the truth, I see the same screen that you see , Every time a different meaning’
Red Bazar really blaze away in this piece with Paul Comerie’s drums driving it all along so crisply and emphatically. Andy Wilson’s guitars sound so heavy, and to really evoke the distortion of politics and the media, Jones throws in a weirdly sonically twisting synth passage. The crunching main theme recapitulates regularly until one final almost apocalyptic scream from Jones… and then we drift into a totally unexpected softer conclusion with laid back bass and drums and Andy Wilson floating in some distinctly jazzy guitar. It does appear that Red Bazar are wanting to mix it up a bit more on this album.
This desire to explore more diverse styles is exemplified and encapsulated in one of the main highlights of the album When the World Burns. Red Bazar pack more ideas and quality into that song’s 5 minutes and 34 seconds than many artists manage in a whole album! Andy Wilson opens the song with delicately picked acoustic guitar and is then joined by Jones’ yearning voice. Peter Jones has shared that the words were written during the Covid pandemic’s ‘Lockdown’ periods in 2020:
‘I was walking the streets one evening and it was deathly quiet, as it tended to be in 2020. Meanwhile on the news, there was rioting, conflict and half the world hating the other half. The contrast was striking, yet it seemed that maybe all the noise and potential destruction might just be on our doorstep at any time.’
This is very clearly a lyric which means a lot to Jones, which he sadly feels ‘has only become more relevant as the years have gone on.’ The song very gradually increases in resonance with a haunting high synth line above the voice and acoustic guitar. Comerie’s comes in with subtle percussive splashes – it’s not all about power. Halfway through Andy Wilson offers up a melancholic nylon guitar solo which starts out rather dirty and grounded, but then ascends gracefully. The whole band joins the elegiac procession with echoing, almost desperate sounding distant backing vocals. The rising storm then recedes to just the acoustic guitar and synth line underpinning Jones’ final pensive recapitulated words. Such a class song.
Just when you thought things might be getting too serious Red Bazar then throw in a fun headbanger in High Velocity, which has been in their live set for a while. This roller coaster runs smoothly throughout on the rock steady tracks of Comerie’s thunderous drums and especially Mick Wilson’s flowing bass. As it turned out, this is Mick Wilson’s final studio album with the band, and he has now been replaced in recent gigs by new bassist Roman Dubovskij… well, Roman has some act to follow. High Velocity is a show case of all their musical skills, including a jazz piano section from Jones and Andy Wilson’s smooth, fluid guitars. The later Fighting Force is another Red Bazar instrumental tour-de-force showcasing fluent guitar passages laid over some outstanding bass and drums, both pieces reminding us of Red Bazar’s fine instrumental act roots.
Start Again takes us in a completely different direction with a rather melancholic introduction. Jones has shared that he was inspired to write these words after re-reading the novel ‘Nerve’ by Dick Francis. This impelled him to muse about ‘hitting rock bottom and then getting back up and rebuilding your life’. This mid-paced piece gives a sense of gravitas and Jones gives a vocal performance of great sensitivity, which imbues some hope into the album. However, for this listener it does feels that stretching this over 9 minutes may have possibly been a little bit too much?
Literature again provides the subject matter for the next piece, The Baron’s Eye, based on the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Illustrious Client’. Musically and thematically, this feels like harking back to Tales from the Bookcase, which featured the Queen of the Night bookend pieces, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’. Revisiting that approach is definitely good news as this is Red Bazar at their best… even if the main protagonist loses his sight in a rather grisly manner at the conclusion! Red Bazar portray this rather horrific story with their usual aplomb, creating evocative atmospherics in this gothic drama.
The sad song Over is apparently a song which has been around for quite a while for Red Bazar but had not made it to an album until now. Andy Wilson blesses this melancholia with a gloriously flowing electric guitar midway through, but the overwhelming sadness about the end of a relationship (or could that be an era?) could start to drag a bit by the end for some, albeit conveyed with real passion.
The finale of Blood Moon is the expansive title track which is over 12 minutes long. Pete Jones has shared that initially he was struggling to come up with another lyric until Mick Wilson suggested the theme of Blood Moons. Jones explained that Mick’s suggestion ‘inspired an apocalyptic song about the end of the world. I mean, who hasn’t contemplated the end of the world with mixed emotions? … Or is that just me?’
Well, it may have been a last-ditch idea but this finale, the last song written and recorded for the album, turns out to be one of the best songs on Blood Moon, full of dynamism and power in widescreen sounds illustrating the theme cinematically. What Red Bazar are so good at doing is threading killer riffs and thrilling passages through this powerhouse of a song. The final section builds and builds with increasing portent until it seemingly crashes under its own weight in a crack of thunder and sound effects… presumably the end of the world, and sadly the end of Mick Wilson’s involvement with the band, and definitely the end of the album!
There is clearly more diversity on Blood Moon, but I am not sure it matches the heights of the truly outstanding Tales from the Bookcase. Blood Moon is a fine album, with quality songs played with skill, but there is a risk it falls between two stools – it could be perceived by some that Blood Moon may not be ‘hard’ enough to fully satisfy the heavy rock purists, and conversely it may not be quite ‘soft’ enough for the ‘Prog’ enthusiasts. However, that’s just a matter of taste – some will love the hard, crunchier bits as much as the more melodic softer parts, and overall you never get less than great quality and imagination from Red Bazar.
In Blood Moon, Red Bazar have produced another high-class album, imaginatively melding heavy riffs with melodic passages. A final song about the end of the world also seems a fittingly apocalyptic way to say goodbye to their skilled bassist, Mick Wilson. This is modern ‘Progressive Rock’ with the emphasis very much being upon the ‘ROCK’.
TRACK LISTING
01. Fall On Your Own Sword (7:29)
02. When The World Burns (5:34)
03. High Velocity (6:26)
04. Start Again (9:14)
05. The Baron’s Eyes (7:42)
06. Fighting Force (3:48)
07. Over (7:31)
08. Blood Moon (12:37)
Total Time – 60:16
MUSICIANS
Andy Wilson – Guitars
Paul Comerie – Drums
Mick Wilson – Bass
Peter Jones – Vocals, Keyboards
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: White Knight Records
Country of Origin: UK
Date of Release: 28th March 2025
DISCOGRAPHY
• Connections (2008) (Instrumental)
• Differential Being (2010) (Instrumental)
• After the Ice Storm (EP) (2013) (Instrumental)
• Tales from the Bookcase (2016)
• Things as they Appear (2019)
• Red Bazar Live (2019) (Download & DVD)
• Connections (2020) (Instrumental)
• Inverted Reality (2022)
• Blood Moon (2025)
