If Gospel music doesn’t aim to educate its audience—in matters of history, in matters of the soul, in matters of pain—is it really Gospel? Please allow legendary Chicago industrial Gospel outfit ONO to answer, as they celebrate their 40th anniversary as a band with the forthcoming release of their powerful new album, Red Summer, due out May 1 via American Dreams Records. While its title directly refers to the surge of racial violence in the United States in the summer of 1919, every track on this record is riddled with facts and anecdotes and images of slavery and unthinkable damages done to black human beings for the last 300 years.
One need only listen to the opening hum of strings, the mournful choir-like hum of “Tar Baby,” premiering here, to gain a sense of the profound suffering embedded in the bones of Red Summer as a whole. But the track goes on to do so much more, as a slow-heavy beat is introduced and frontperson Travis’ thundering vocals echo hideous truths, dates, names, all surrounding the slave trade, all whose hands are drenched in blood. Instrumental composition, by bandmate and founding ONO member P Michael Grego, shifts into an impossibly catchy groove—no less weighty, no less sober. This track has everything. The band speaks, irrefutably, to the injustices done unto Haiti, unto black humanity. P Michael creates pauses in the music, for realignment, for a new bough to break. “Papa, are you ungrateful,” Travis bellows. “I am your brother’s daughter.” A thousand church bells fall from the sky and crash in gorgeous harmony and the beat treads on to its unsettled, electronically eclectic finish. What do you do when you realize that the body (bodies) over whose humanity and human rights you’d been arguing, has a voice? A soul? You listen.