The Reds, Pinks & Purples : Acknowledge Kindness
San Francisco’s Glenn Donaldson has built an industry of rituals that so many eagerly await with each Reds, Pinks & Purples project. For starters, the record covers, including his newest full-length Acknowledge Kindness with its trademark pastel-splashed photograph, feature a sea-green succulent of sorts pressed up against a window, with the image of a brick apartment building from across the street on that pane. I’d guess it’s yet another mundane observation you might miss when traveling through Donaldson’s Inner Richmond neighborhood, but with an inventive eye and snap of a camera, these routine, humdrum, everyday surroundings become, well…art.
For years, he’s told these sarcastic and just plain sad tales through song, using a forlorn tone, to enunciate that “enveloping ennui” (what he calls it on his own Bandcamp page), or you can refer to it as the “SF Sadcore vibe,” into arrangements describing “bands that never made it” with those soundscapes pinned in back with excuses. That evergreen late-’80s college rock vibe with a bit of those stinky-but-beautiful corpse flower aromas that populate the air in the Bay, flowing through narratives about dreamers who arrived in this city with idealistic notions and departed with the problems of reality; bands who believed they had succeeded but ended up destroying themselves. Donaldson keeps firmly planted in the role of an elder and an oracle in a city that desperately needs, at all times, a jaded adult who is constantly on guard.
Acknowledge Kindness saw Donaldson work on his process for eight months, which included listening to devastating records, walking through Golden Gate Park, and getting stoned while staring at flowers to get to that place. “Emo Band” is a praise and a cheap shot of a song all at once, rolled into an Indica sedation, under the weight of high-end shimmer of guitars and acoustic piano. With gossamer yarns, “Can you still pretend to have feelings inside again” and “You can’t know what the music is for anymore like you did when you were poor“—these words are silly and Zeus-like all at once, with their bummer-type humor.
He’s always gotten inside a previous time in SF, but this time it’s undeniable; an era where smoking was allowed in bars, Muni issued paper transfers, and the once popular Mission Yuppie Eradication Project was alive and kicking in my old arts neighborhood so hard that when friends from Oakland would swing through and meet me up for a drink, they’d ask with bewilderment, “You got white people battling white people around here?” Those ghosts of American Music Club, Red House Painters, bygone days of Michelle Tea promoting and talking about her lesbian cult classic novel “Valencia” in the local neighborhood bookshops, it’s this arts-centric era of San Francisco that resides deeply in the ending, droning instrumental “Acknowledge Kindness” and throughout this showcase album that’d make anybody want to kick that tech version of Ess Eff, the one that exists right now, in the chicken nuggets.
Label: Fire
Year: 2026
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