Excerpts from Playing for his life - Byron Coley, Mojo, February 2003

'And Red Cross certainly brims with evidence that John had become quite fond of a strange, digital guitar tone; but it is also packed with playing that should quiet the moans of even the mouldiest figs. Two standards are tackled - Irving Berlin's Remember and the Gershwin's Summertime - with a delicacy unheard since Railroad I. Other pieces unroll just as Fahey's great collaged string texts always have. There's also a pair of tunes showing John's deep connection with the music of Loren MazzCane Connors (Fahey's only peer in the avantblues field), and there are weird touchs aplenty to keep things from drifting off into nostalgia.'

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Red Cross is John Fahey's last album. Recorded a few months before the guitarist's death in February 2001, it is a tantalizing taste of where he was musically in those final days. If there was one thing about Fahey's recordings that made them distinctive, it was their unpredictability. Fahey was an American original, a crucial figure in expanding the boundaries of the acoustic guitar over the last few decades of the 20th century. On this recording there are expansive and decidedly nontraditional interpretations of such standards as Irving Berlin's "Remember" and George & Ira Gershwin's "Summertime". But there are also a couple of electric guitar musings that are equally haunting and full of intrigue. The final listed track (there's a hidden track so buried most folks may never find it) is called "Untitled with Rain", a mysterious tone poem of sorts that ebbs and flows with an eccentric, psychedelic throb. As with all releases on the Revenant label, the packaging of Red Cross is worth mentioning: It's an odd, rectangular-shaped letter-pressed foldout with booklet that contains a wonderfully warm glimpse of Fahey's last days by confidante Glenn Jones of the Chicago band Cul de Sac.

JIM CALIGIURI

No Depression #44
Mar - Apr 2003

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Entertainment Weekly

02/28/2003 (Copyright 2003) JOHN FAHEY Red Cross (Revenant) The late guitarist and folklorist's final album is a poignant summation of his eccentric approach to vernacular music. Bathed in reverb, his acoustic guitar ranges from primly traditional plucking on standards like Gershwin's "Summertime" to haunted abstractions that tantalizingly bounce around coherent melodies. It sounds spacey and ancient at the same time--and it's all oddly moving. A- --MW

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Sunday Times - London News International

02/23/2003 (Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd, 2003)
JOHN FAHEY Red Cross Revenant RVN104CD **
JOHN FAHEY was an American acoustic guitarist who used the blues music he grew up with as a doorway into a world of abstract, impressionistic sound. At the time of his death in 2001 he was emerging from a decade of depression, making records and touring again. But Red Cross was to be his final work, its title track a holy meditation of layered tones. Irving Berlin's Remember is recast as a stately ceremonial, suggesting vintage Mississippi steamers heading down the Amazon river. Analais toys with eastern-sounding scales and the traditional Motherless Child is used as a starting point for eight-and-a-half minutes of blues-based extrapolations. Charley Bradley's Ten Sixty-Six Blues and Untitled W/Rain feed stray, strangulated notes into found-sound backgrounds, reconciling Fahey the virtuoso and Fahey the restless artist. Red Cross is a glorious parting gift. --SL

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From the Aquarius record store homepage (Bay Area):

FAHEY, JOHN Red Cross (Revenant) cd 17.98
"Red Cross, Disciple of Christ Today, by John Fahey, Guitar Evangelist." This is the last album by John Fahey before his death in 2001, and "guitar evangelist" seems like the perfect description of his legacy. With his acoustic guitar drenched in reverb, "Red Cross" sees Fahey traversing all his signature territory, condensing the entirety of American folk-blues tradition into a uniquely emotional and present instrumental language that also touches on eastern modalities and droning psychedelia. His talent for arranging classic compositions is represented by a version of Irving Berlin's "Remember" and a truly moving, beautiful take on the Gershwins' "Summertime" (I'm always a sucker for that song, but this version really blows me away). It's hard not to read into these tracks, knowing they were recorded so soon before Fahey's passing. The last, "hidden" track especially reverberates with a kind of somber, distant contemplation, while many of the other tracks possess the joyful but calm exhuberance that comes with being at peace with fate. If there's anything to be learned from the touching liner notes by Cul De Sac's Glenn Jones, however, it's that Fahey was a man who truly lived for today, and if the album can be read as a reflection on the past or acceptance of the future it might just be by chance. But it doesn't seem to be by chance that the last album recorded by a guitar genius decades along in his career stands alongside his very best. Simultaneously uplifting in its gorgeousness and heartbreaking in its unintended function as a final farewell.