Red Blend Wine: A blend of simplicity and vibes

Introducing a 'new' band to readers often poses a challenge. It's always confusing as a lot of them do not boast of any sort of discography to provide enough relevance or context to people. However, that's not the case with 'Red Blend Wine' as they released their self titled debut album just a couple of weeks ago.

If you're going into this article expecting an interesting background story as to how the band or their music came to be, you might be a tad disappointed. "There's no interesting storyline regarding anything that relates to the band, or the music we play. It's just the vibes," said founder and guitarist Ratnadeep Toorja.

For Toorja, 'Red Blend Wine' was his musical gateway; a setup that was not confined within a certain genre. Hailing from a Death metal band, he wanted to venture into the possibility of playing and creating diverse music. A setting where he could play a soft plucking if he wanted to, or tweak his distortion a bit to sound 'dirty', like a grunge band.

"I know every band out there says that their songs do not belong to a single genre. But playing through the album, even as a listener, I felt each track was different from another. They sounded different musically," said the vocalist Shihab Tanee.

The breaking the boundaries of genre cliches is evident throughout their album. No band likes their songs to be compared against others. But for the sake of reader convenience I have to say that a casual listener will find some similarities with other bands when it comes to the sound.

"If you go through the tracks, you will definitely feel that some were metal influenced. A couple may sound like Nirvana, and then there's a track that gives off a bit of RHCP vibes," said Toorja.

For instance, you could take two of their songs, 'Naturalist' and 'OCD' and the diversity in the nuances of the genres can be easily understood. Where 'Naturalist' is a sombre song with soft pluckings, conveying messages about not confining oneself within the boundaries of the classroom but allowing us to learn from the nature; OCD is probably the heaviest track on the album which ends in pure metal fashion with heavy use of the whammy bar.

'Red Blend Wine' is yet another band that chooses to do their craft in the English language.  Toorja, the main songwriter of the band, felt that songs in English will make them more relatable and understandable to more people beyond borders, given that through social media content spreads fast.

The band put serious thought into proceeding with English songs right after they released their debut single 'Getaway Dreamer' back in 2021 and Toorja started receiving texts and good wishes from people across many countries.

"I got inspiration from the Scorpions. They were a German band but they wrote in English. If they wrote Wind of Change in German, it wouldn't have had the same level of impact around the world," Toorja explained.

Red Blend Wine currently has its members residing in different countries of the world and having recorded their album in English makes it all the more easier for the band members to share their music with their foreign friends.

Not having the entire band physically present does carry a challenge. It was for that very reason they released their album virtually. Could they have waited a bit longer for all of the members to come together so that they could have a physical launch with live performances?

"Well, if truth be told, this album should have been released long ago, but for a lot of reasons we couldn't. There was no point delaying it any further as almost all the work had been completed long ago," said Tanee.

Red Blend Wine currently has two active members, Shihab Tanee and Ratnadeep Toorja. In the album, Zami Hossain recorded the bass and Adnan Rashid was the one with the sticks. The lineup originally consisted of Yash Changma on Bass. Their producer Sayem Rahman Rakib was a vocalist of 'Rockophobic'.