Recorded with producer/engineer Steven Schram and released on the band's own Hooch Hound Records, Listen To Little Red polishes up the band's live favourites and adds some fine new sounds to the catalogue.
In the former category, the space-race R&B of Speedo and the (frat) party-starting Little Annie and Jackie Cooper sound fresher than ever. In the latter, "side two" kicks off with Stare In Love, which would be as at home on Beserkley or Stiff Records as it is on Hooch Hound, and the bittersweet bookend, Autumn Leaves, as touching a paean to the end of summer as anything from Brian Wilson's sandbox.
The record sounds clean and fresh and ready and willing, like it's turned up to take your daughter to the junior prom with a refrigerated corsage and a souped-up convertible waiting outside.
But this is no retro freakfest; it's timelessness.

As Dom sings on Stare In Love, "Simple little things say a lot about a man", and you could easily replace "man" with "band" and find yourself with Little Red's mission statement. Listen To Little Red is as accurate a summation of a band's powers as you can get. There are no stunt guest artists here, no fiddly production, no electrorock keyboards or "Eastern period" sitars. Such simplicity teeters close to the brink of unfashionability if you ask any of the million-member, fifty-instrument "ensembles" doing the rounds today, but it shows that Little Red have the guts to let their songs speak for themselves.
It's hard to pinpoint just what makes a band great these days. In fact, it's questionable as to whether we ever really knew; after all, once upon a time it was hep for the Daily Mirror (in 1964) to describe the Rolling Stones as "on the beat with Not Fade Away, which is in the modern idiom" - hardly an illustrious critical beginning to the 40-year rock'n'roll juggernaut that Jagger and Richards et al would become. And, on the flipside, my Dad once took a bet that Gerry & The Pacemakers would be bigger than The Beatles.