Red Earth by Crash Vegas

Red Earth, the 1989 debut from Canadian band Crash Vegas, came out on Risque Disque, the label Blue Rodeo had set up, and Blue Rodeo's Greg Keelor is all over it: he worked on songs with Michelle McAdorey, co-wrote some of the music and added guitar to the title track and "The One That Keeps Me Running". Malcolm Burn produced it, mostly at The Lab, the Hamilton studio he ran with the band's bassist at the time, Jocelyne Lanois, once of Martha & The Muffins. Burn also chipped in piano, keyboards, percussion and backing vocals.

The mood is dusky, brooding folk rock, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Cowboy Junkies and 10,000 Maniacs, with guitars that drift like smoke over an empty highway. "Sky", "Smoke" and "Inside Out" all got played on Canadian radio, and there's a cover of "Down to the Wire", a Buffalo Springfield song from their shelved Stampede album that first surfaced on Neil Young's Decade.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.